Degrees
- PhD in Biophysics, Harvard University, 1998
- MSc in Chemistry, The Weizmann Institute of Science, 1994
- Diploma with Honors, in Physics, The Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, 1992
Selected Awards/Societies
- Alfred Sloan Research Fellow
- John F & Virginia B. Taplin Award Recipient
Research Interests
Professor Mirny's research focuses on computational structural and
system biology. His multidisciplinary approach combines first-principle
physics with the analysis of biological systems such as genes, proteins,
and metabolic pathways. His efforts in computational structural
biology involve the development of novel computational tools to
analyze and predict structures of proteins, their complexes, and
protein-DNA interactions. In these studies, Professor Mirny seeks
to identify amino acids that determine specific DNA recognition,
to test these predictions in future experiments, and to find methods
to engineer proteins with novel biological functions. His research
seeks to extract efficiently biological knowledge from experimental
genomic and proteomic data and to develop a fundamental understanding
of the molecular mechanisms involved in cellular regulation, which
aims to reconstruct the cell's entire regulatory network-a goal
of both genomics and bioinformatics research.
Reference Publications
- Slutsky M, Mirny LA. Kinetics of protein-DNA interaction: facilitated target location in sequence-dependent potential. Biophys J. 2004 Dec;87(6):4021-35.
- Spirin V. and Mirny LA. Protein complexes and functional modules in molecular networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2003 100(21):12123-8.
- Li. L, Shakhnovich E., and Mirny LA. Amino acids determining enzyme-substrate specificity in prokaryotic and eukaryotic protein kinases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2003 100(8):4463-8.
