Gordon Broderick, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Pulmonary Medicine
Department of Medicine
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
University of Alberta
Phone: (780) 492-1633
Fax: (780) 407 3217
gordon.broderick@ualberta.ca

Profile and Research Interests

An engineer by training, Dr. Broderick holds a Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from the University of Montreal (Ecole Polytchnique de Montreal) as well as a Master’s in Chemical Engineering and an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering both from McGill University. After 12 years in private sector research he joined the Institute for Biomolecular Design (University of Alberta) in 2002 to lead the CyberCell computational team in creating a dynamic spatial model of a living cell. Dr. Broderick is currently applying his background in classical systems engineering and his work with discrete probabilistic models to study self-organisation and the emergence of complex behaviour in distributed physiological systems. Of particular interest are the context-specific population dynamics of the immune system.

Collaborating with Dr. Philip Halloran as a principal investigator with the Alberta Transplant Applied Genomics Centre (ATAGC), he is leading an effort directed at the design of biologically motivated mathematical models which describe the evolution (temporal and spatial) of graft injury, repair and rejection in kidney transplantation. A first theme is directed at understanding the contribution of certain architectural motifs of the gene regulatory network to processes driving rejection. Network hierarchy and modularity are being exploited to reconcile the experimental data from high-throughput technology with current theoretical understanding of the system. In a second theme, temporal evolution of recovery from injury (isograft) or lapse into rejection (allograft) are being analysed with regard to their nonlinear dynamical properties, for example bifurcation and the presence of multiple stable states. Analysis of network structure and dynamics will be reunited and studied through the development of population-based models describing the emergent spatial dynamics of immune cell interaction in a graft (collaboration with Dr. Jack Tuszunski of the Cross Cancer Institute).

The long-term goal is to understand how complex and often unpredictable behaviour of the immune system evolves in a distributed population of cells without central authority through the limited interaction of relatively simple individuals. Specifically the modelling inflammation as a component of immune response promises to be widely applicable in the greater context of inflammatory diseases such as asthma and COPD.

Highlighted Publications

• Ridgway D, Broderick G, Ellison MJ (2006). Accommodating Space, Time and Randomness in Network Simulation. Curr Opin Biotechnol 17: 1-6. doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2006.08.004.

• Broderick G, Craddock RC, Whistler T, Taylor R, Klimas N, Unger ER (2006). Identifying illness parameters in fatigue syndromes using classical projection methods. Pharmacogenomics 7 (3): 407-419.

• Broderick G, Ru’aini M, Chan E, Ellison MJ (2004). A Life-like Virtual Cell Membrane Using Discrete Automata. In Silico Biology 5: 0016. http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/2004/05/0016/.