Dr. Andres Kriete is Teaching Professor and Associate Dean for academic affairs in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems at Drexel University. Andres works on systems biology and bioinformatics and their application to aging research. The focus of Andres' research is on the systems biology of aging, taking an integrative view of a biological process that disturbs a broad range of cellular and physiological functions in a complex and global fashion. His lab explores concepts from engineering (complex systems, robustness, control theory) to decipher the mechanisms of aging at the intersection of experimental, computational, and theoretical biology. They have established an aging model for post-mitotic cells through “Energy Restriction in Quiescence” (ERiQ). This experimental platform resembles metabolic stress responses and transcriptional regulation seen in many aging tissues, which may underlie the development of age-related diseases involving deregulation of the Akt, mTOR, NF-kappaB and p53 signaling pathways. Andres'lab has suggested that aging is a robustness tradeoff of complex evolutionary systems. Cellular responses are tuned to provide survival to acute stressors, but these responses conflict with longevity assurance. To demonstrate, they assembled generic whole cell models using feedback loop motifs from control theory in conjunction with rule-based descriptors simulating the progression of aging. Such models can be executed rapidly and repeatedly to study the effect of molecular mechanisms on the aging phenotype. In 2007, Andres co-organized a first workshop on the Systems Biology of Aging at the Santa Fe Institute, NM, entitled "Complexities of Aging in Biological Systems." Subsequent 2008 and 2009 meetings promoting systems approaches in aging included seminars held at ASU and NIH-NIA, under the title of "Systems Biology in Human Aging," which was continued as SBHA-2010 in Philadelphia, PA. Current students he is supervising include John Malamon (Genome Systems Analysis in Alzheimer’s Disease), Ian Kennedy (Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease), Meghan Knecht (Predictive Biosimulation) and Shayne Watson (Pharmacokinetics Modeling). His teaching interests are in Biosimulation, Principles of Systems Analysis, Biostatistics and Bioimaging, and his research interests are cellular and computational bioengineering, systems biology of aging, control theory and bioimaging.