The Chemical and Biological Engineering Department will host the 2017 Ralph Peck Lecture on Friday, April 14 at 4 p.m. in Perlstein Hall Auditorium featuring speaker Babatunde A. Ogunnaike, dean; William L. Friend Chair of Chemical Engineering; and professor, Center for Systems Biology – DBI at University of Delaware College of Engineering.

The topic of the lecture will be “Biological Control Systems: Systems Biology of Diseases and the Design of Effective Treatment.”

A reception will follow. This event is free and open to the Illinois Institute of Technology community. For more information about the Peck Lecture Series click here.

The mammalian organism maintains stable, efficient and “near-optimal” performance and homeostasis in the face of external and internal perturbations via distinct biological systems ranging from the large-scale physiological (nervous, endocrine, immune, circulatory, respiratory, etc.), to the cellular (growth and proliferation regulation, DNA damage repair, etc.), and the sub-cellular (gene expression, protein synthesis, metabolite regulation, etc.). “Biological Control Systems,” a sub-topic of Control Theory, arises from a control engineering perspective of the function, organization, and coordination of these multi-scale biological systems and the control mechanisms that enable them to carry out their functions effectively.

In this presentation, Ogunnaike will provide an overview of how physiological life is made possible by control, and demonstrate the usefulness of a control engineering perspective of pathologies for diagnosis, design, and implementation of effective treatments. The concepts and principles will be illustrated using three specific examples with significant research and clinical implications: Ca++ Regulations.TGF-B and prostate cancer; and Platelet Deficiency Control.