Research

I am currently working on topics within Systems Biology and Robust Control. I am also interested in topics about Synthetic Biology, Model Reduction, System Identification, Optimization etc..

My doctoral project is 'Control Theoretic Approaches to Biochemical Network Modeling'. The project will consider modeling of intracellular networks, both at the genetic and metabolic level, with the aim of optimizing given cell functionalities. This will include developing tools for inferring network structures from response data, for model reduction of large scale networks while conserving key properties of relevance for a given application, for devising network modifications to achieve desired functionality and, finally, for optimizing pathways in complex networks by means of environmental and genetic manipulation. The project will be part of the VINNOVA Competence Center for Advanced Bio Production (AdBioPro).

For more information, please see my publications and courses.

Current Projects:

Biochemical Network Inference

The reconstruction of biochemical networks is a challenging problem. We consider mathematical modeling of biochemical networks, focusing on understanding and learning the structure of networks from response data.

The applications are, but not limit to, gene regulatory network, target identification etc.

Related publications:

[C2] Yu Wang and Elling W. Jacobsen, "Inferring Individual Edges in Dynamic Networks - with Application to Target Identification in Gene Networks.", accepted for the 21th IFAC World Congress, Berlin, Germany, July 12th-17th 2020

[C1] Yu Wang and Elling W. Jacobsen, 'A Geometric Approach to Target Identification', Presented at the 8th IFAC Conference on Foundations of Systems Biology in Engineering (oral presentation), València, Spain, 15th October – 18th October 2019.

Network Identifiability

We consider the identifiability of networks, given input-output data or other informations. We focus on establishing conditions for network identifiability and experiment design, with applications in biochemical networks.

Related publications:

[C3] Yu Wang and Elling W. Jacobsen, "Necessary and sufficient conditions for Boolean structure reconstruction of LTI networks", submitted to the 19^th European Control Conference , Rotterdam, The Netherlands , June 29^th- July 2^th 2021

Apart from the current projects above, I am also interested in: model reduction, analyzing the impact of network interactions on biological functions and their robustness, and Synthetic biology.

Past Projects:

Experiment Videos

Cooperative Transportation of Mobile Manipulators with Collision Avoidance

2017/09 - 2018/05

This is a project conducted between 2017/09 to 2018/05 in the group of Prof. Dimos V. Dimarogonas.

We consider the problem of collision avoidance of mobile manipulators, propose and implement decentralized and centralized Nonlinear Model Predictive Control schemes, both in simulations and experiments conducted in Smart Mobility Lab, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. We use feedback linearization and model reduction to reduce overall complexity of the model, provide a mathematical proof for feasibility and convergence of the schemes. The simulations and experiments validate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed schemes.

Publications: Cooperative Transportation of Mobile Manipulators With Collision Avoidance, Master Thesis, 2018

More past projects to be added.