Dr Ben Shirt-Ediss

I am Senior Research Associate in the group of Prof N. Krasnogor at Newcastle University. By training I am an interdisciplinary computer scientist with interests in nucleic acid nanotechnology, origins of life, systems chemistry, artificial life and synthetic biology. I specialise in creating and analysing computational and mathematical models of complex reaction processes based on mass action kinetics. As much as possible, I try to develop models in close collaboration with experimentalists and fit the model outcomes directly to experimental data. For my PhD work I simulated the reaction dynamics and membrane biophysics of protocells. Most recently, I have worked on modelling the self-assembly and dis-assembly of DNA origami nanostructures, on multi-objective sequence design for DNA origami, and on modelling a stack data structure that stores information in polymers of DNA (see the paper). In the EnDROIDS project I am using my computational skills to support the experimental realisation of in vivo (within cell) data structures that can store information in DNA and RNA assemblies.