(cache) Sergei Maslov

I am a tenured scientific staff member at the Condensed Matter Theory Group, Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory located on Long Island in New York.

More formal info about my career path can be found in my Curriculum Vitae which I am trying to keep up to date.

My recent preprints on arxiv.org could be conveniently accessed by following this link.

The members of my research group are listed here.

Work address:

Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, 11973
Tel: +1-(631) 344-3742; FAX: +1-(631) 344-2918
E@mail:
WWW: http://www.cmth.bnl.gov/~maslov

Home address:

40 Suffolk Down, Shoreham, New York, 11786
(631) 821-4505 (h); (631) 327-8222 (cell)

Photos:

My recent Picasa albums can be found here. Some older photos are here.

Research interests:

Throughout most of my scientific career I was working in the highly interdisciplinary field of statistical physics of complex systems.

My current research concentrates on topics in systems and computational biology with particular emphasis on properties of complex biomolecular networks. These networks operate inside living cells on multiple levels including protein-protein binding, transcriptional regulation, signaling, metabolism. I am interested to understand questions as:

	How biological networks minimize the undesirable crosstalk and limit the effects of non-specific interactions (MSB 2008, PNAS 2007, NJP 2007, Science 2002)?
	How they achieve robustness against noise and perturbations (PNAS 2007, PRL 2008, Science 2002)?
	How topological properties of these networks affect their functioning inside living cells (Nucleic Acids Research 2005, Phys. Biol. 2007, BMC Bioinformatics 2006, PRL 2004, Science 2002)?
	How bio-molecular networks and underlying genomes change in the course of evolution (BMC Evol. Biol. 2004, Nucleic Acids Research 2005, Biol. Direct 2007, Evol. Bioinformatics 2007)?

I am also interested in emergent properties of large information networks. These networks connect routers in the Internet, link webpages or scientific publications to each other, etc.

Here I have recently worked on the following topics:

How to best detect functional units or modules/communities in any type of complex network (PRL 2003, Physica A 2004, Physica A 2007)?

How to efficiently search and rank the information contained in large networks (J. of_Stat_Phys 2007, J. of Neuroscience 2008, J. of Informetrics 2007, Physica A 2007, PRL 2001)? Together with my students we have recently proposed a new algorithm (CiteRank) ranking scientific publications by their relevance to current research directions. If interested, here you could look up the ranking of your own papers published in American Physical Society journals.

In my studies I often rely on the tools of my primary field - theoretical statistical physics. Even more important than tools, theoretical physics has taught me about the power of simple models in revealing the essence of complex phenomena. Simple models are indispensable if one wants not to just reproduce the complexity of a system (e.g. by detailed computer simulations) but to truly understand it.

Before focusing on complex networks I worked on a variety of topics including (in reverse chronological order) Econophysics, Low-dimensional magnetism, and Self-Organized Criticality.

This page was last updated on November 26, 2008