Principal Investigator

Van Savage

Postdoctoral Researchers

former members

Tony Dell

Samraat Pawar

Graduate Students

Lewis Lee is a doctoral student in the Department of Biomathematics and the System & Integrative Biology Training Program. 
Current research in collaboration with Dr. Pamela Yeh’s laboratory aims to uncover structural dynamics of phenotypic
variation in fluctuating environments using an experimental microbial system. This investigation may generate new
theoretical constructs for use in the study and mathematical modeling of bacterial and tumor heterogeneity.


Kevin Leu (rotation student) is an MSTP student in the School of Medicine at UCLA. He is working to help connect
models and data for tumor growth, and specifically how the structure and flow of tumor vasculature can be used to
predict rates of growth, fractions of proliferative, quiescent, and necrotic cells, and regrowth after treatment.

former students

Mitchell Johnson successfully defended his masters degree at UCLA in September. For his project he wrote software
in OCaml to read angiographic data (e.g., MRI, CT scans, X-rays, etc.) and use image processing to extract the structure
of the vascular system, including a skeletonized network version and measures of vessel raddi, length, volumes, and
more. He also wrote software for visualizing and analyzing the extracted data to determing the fractal exponents and
types of distributions that characterize the vessel geometry across branching junctions.


Undergraduate Students

Dalit Yadegaran is a Sophomore at UCLA and on the pre-medical track. She is currently involved in and
contributing to a research project exploring mechanisms that control species interactions. The project uses high-speed
video and automated tracking software to understand how environmental drivers (e.g., light, temperature, humidity,
etc) affect the components and dynamics of predator-prey relationships. She is primarily responsible for running
predator-prey trials with a variety of insects as well as analysis of video using Matlab.


Agafe Saguros  is at UCLA and currently using video and automated tracking software to understand how temperature
affects predator-prey interactions in insects via its effects on components such as body velocity, detection distance,
turning angle, handling time, and other factors.


Sania Pouyanard is at UCLA and working with video and automated tracking software to study how temperature
and dimensionality of the seach space/habitat can affect consumption rates in predator-prey interactions for insects.


former students

Janice Chan is currently a graduate student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. While an
undergraduate at UCLA, she learned Matlab and begain analyzing key traits, such as consumption and population
growth rate, from our comprehensive database to test the hypothesis of "Hotter is Better"--higher temperatures result
in higher absolute values for fitness and other traits.


Kina Winoto is graduated with a computer science degree from the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science. As part of
and NSF funded REU project, she worked on a comprehensive database for the temperature responses of traits and migrated it from
Access to MySql. She also streamlined the database as part of this process and helpied to develop a web interface for other
researchers to upload, download, and analyze data as part of this evolving trait database. She is now a graduate student at
Columbia University.