Welcome to the Mahoney lab. We are a systems biology group that studies biological networks in as many facets of biology as data and collaborators will allow. We are just getting started at the University of Vermont!
If you would like to chat, maybe collaborate, otherwise get to know us, please peruse our publications or come find us. There may even be occasional blogging and tweets.
Currently we have two major projects:
Functional neural networks in epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a network disease, meaning that seizures derive from the abnormal connectivity between neurons at the smallest scale and between brain regions at higher scales. However, the functional consequences of this disorganization, in particular how it affects cognition and behavior, are difficult to predict. Our strategy is to statistically model neural spike trains to capture these functional abnormalities at the level of neural coding. If this sounds interesting to you, a good place to start is this paper.
Functional genomics of autoimmunity.
Systemic sclerosis (SSc) and other autoimmune diseases result from aberrant immune activation. The character of any particular autoimmune disease lies in how these immune cells interact with other tissues. We use functional genomic networks to parse these interactions and make inferences about the pathogenesis of SSc. Our current view is that innate immune cells, particularly macrophages, are critical for initiating and sustaining fibrosis in SSc skin. We are actively mining functional genomic networks for further clues to how this works in other SSc-affected organs, such as the lungs, as well as trying to identify novel drug targets to eventually cure this disease. If this sounds interesting to you, a good place to start is this paper.