Dr. Daniel Thomas Gillespie - Physicist ======================= The popular understanding about chemical reactions is that the molecules and atoms react with each other to form new molecules by colliding with each other. The amount of reactants left unconsumed or products formed are usually thought to be ‘determined’ as functions over time (ordinary or partial differential equations). However molecular entities do not behave an in an ‘expected’ fashion but rather collide ‘randomly’ and factoring this random movement makes it difficult to calculate the amount of reactants and products in the system as functions of time. Dr. Gillespie came up with a mathematical structure and an algorithm (which bears his name) which explained how this could be achieved without compromising on the fact that molecular entities react with each other by random collisions (stochastic). The paper titled “Exact Stochastic Simulation of Coupled Chemical Reactions” published in 1977 has more than 4700 citations indicating the seminal value of Dr. Gillespie’s contribution. Dan Gillespie is a physicist, with a B.A. from Rice University and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His graduate work in high energy physics, and also his postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland in classical transport theory, featured extensive use of Monte Carlo methods, and that colored much of his later research. For three decades he was a civilian research scientist for the U. S. Navy in China Lake, California. Since his retirement from there in 2001 he has been a private consultant in computational biochemistry, working under contracts with researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara. This work has been aimed at developing better ways of numerically modeling biochemical systems, improving and extending some stochastic simulation approaches he had developed earlier. His research publication list also contains articles on raindrop formation in clouds, light scattering in aerosols, random variable theory, Brownian motion, thermal electrical noise, applied stochastic process theory, and quantum mechanics. He is the author of “A Quantum Mechanics Primer” (in print from 1970-1986) and “Markov Processes: An Introduction for Physical Scientists” (Academic Press, 1992). He is currently writing, in collaboration with E. Seitaridou, a book on molecular diffusion. Sources : Conference on Stochastic Systems Biology, 20-22 July 2011, Monte Verità, Centro Stefano Franscini and Wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gillespie
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 23:12:04 +0000
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