My name is Brooks Taylor, and I am a Ph.D student working in Jeff Hasty's Biodynamics Lab at UCSD (2009-present). I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009 with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering. Before that, I was born and raised in the Deep South, and though I don't have much of an accent anymore, I can still eat a lot of barbeque.

Frank Herbert wrote that "A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it." My primary interest is in developing and applying tools to do just that: to explore the dynamic forces that shape the development and response of all living things.

This site is here to exhibit and explain some of my work. If something interests you, please feel free to drop me a line at .

My research is highly integrative: I believe leaps in biological understanding require experience and tools from a lot of different areas. The study of the macrophage innate immune response is a perfect example of this; here is a bewilderingly complex process, where multiple chemical inputs and modulators and sources of noise all determine cellular decision-making. The response has characteristic behaviors on scales of minutes to days, and dramatically varies from cell to cell.

Macrophages respond to bacterially-
derived lipopolysaccharide

Simply watching a time-lapse movie of a few cells responding to a bacterial signal reveals all kinds of fascinating behavior, so that's where I decided to start. I built an algorithm that would be able to take in thousands of images, then track, label, and measure the individual cells. This way, we could quickly analyze an experiment and tell better stories- quantitative trajectories of how individual macrophages move, grow, divide, and change in time.

Labeling NF-kB allows correlation of
signalling and behavior

Automated tracking and measurement is only a means to an end: we seek better a explanation into the process of mammalian decision making, which occurs at the molecular level. Using fluorescently-tagged versions of native promoters and genes such as NF-kB, we can tell much more of the story. To that end, much of my time and effort is directed towards genetic modification, allowing measurement of cell signalling behavior and downstream gene expression that occurs in each immune cell.

We combine these tools with microfluidics expertise to allow careful control of the cellular microenvironment underneath the microscope. Ultimately, this allows us a much closer look at the organization of heterogeneous individuals into a coherent response, and the links between external inputs and eventual cell fate.

Automated image analysis identifies signaling pathways regulating distinct signatures of cardiac myocyte hypertrophy. Gregory T. Bass, Karen A. Ryall, Ashwin Katikapalli, Brooks E. Taylor, Stephen T. Dang, Scott T. Acton, Jeffrey J. Saucerman. Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. December 1, 2011

A real-time technique for selective molecular imaging and drug delivery in large blood vessels. Patil, A.V. ; Rychak, J.J. ; Taylor, B. ; Lowrey, B.T. ; Hossack, J.A. 2010 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium 14 October, 2010

Below are some examples of my design work- something I've been lucky enough to be able to do as a nice change of pace from the daily grad school grind.