We are pleased to announce that Dr. Marc Birtwistle has joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering this Fall as an Associate Professor.
Dr. Birtwistle received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. Prior to accepting his position at Clemson, Dr. Birtwistle was a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Throughout his research and teaching at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dr. Birtwistle developed strong expertise in cancer systems biology and pharmacology.
His research interest is in exploring how variability between individual cells influences both signaling in cancer cells and the response of cancers to therapies. He addresses these issues by combining experiments with mathematical modeling.
Dr. Birtwistle is the PI on three NIH grants. One is an R01 funded by NIGMS focused on understanding why seemingly identical human cells respond completely differently to the same treatments, having potential applications, for example, in partial drug responses in cancer. Another is an R21 from the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies program of NCI focused on a new method for increased multiplexing of measurements from tumor biopsy sections. The third is with two other co-PIs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for a Data Generation Center in the LINCS consortium funded by the Common Fund—only six centers are awarded across the nation.
In the Spring, Dr. Birtwistle will be teaching a new Biomolecular course called Bioprocess Engineering.
We welcome Dr. Birtwistle to the ChBE Team! His background and expertise will be a great asset to our department and to the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences.
Dr. Marc R. Birtwistle Selected Publications
M Bouhaddou, AM Barrette, RJ Koch, MS DiStefano, EA Riesel, AD Stern, LC Santos, A Tan, A Mertz, and MR Birtwistle An Integrated Mechansitic Model of Pan-Cancer Driver Pathways Predicts Stochastic Proliferation and Death bioRxiv preprint (April 2017)
M Bouhaddou, MS DiStefano, EA Riesel, E Carrasco, HY Holzapfel, DC Jones, GR Smith, AD Stern, SS Somani, TV Thompson, MR Birtwistle. Drug Response Consistency in CCLE and CGP. Nature (2016)
GR Smith and MR Birtwistle. A Mechanistic Beta-Binomial Probability Model for mRNA Sequencing Data. PLoS One (2016)
AS Stern, A Rahman and MR Birtwistle. Cell Size Assays for Mass Cytometry. Cytometry A, (2016).
Gallo JM and Birtwistle MR. Network pharmacodynamic models for customized cancer therapy. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Systems Biology and Medicine (2015).
Victor A Levin, Peter J Tonge, James M Gallo, Birtwistle, MR, Arvin C Dar, Antonio Iavarone, Patrick J Paddison, Timothy P Heffron, William F Elmquist, Jean E Lachowicz, Ted W Johnson, Forest M White, Joohee Sul, Quentin R Smith, Wang Shen, Jann N Sarkaria, Ramakrishna Samala, Patrick Y Wen, Donald A Berry, Russell C Petter. CNS Anticancer Drug Discovery and Development Conference White Paper. Neuro-Oncology (2015).
Birtwistle MR*. Analytical reduction of combinatorial complexity arising from multiple protein modification sites, Interface (2015).
Bouhaddou M and Birtwistle MR. Dimerization-based control of cooperativity. Mol Biosystems (2014).
X‐Y Zhang*, MR Birtwistle*, JM Gallo. A General Network Pharmacodynamic Model–Based Design Pipeline for Customized Cancer Therapy Applied to the VEGFR Pathway, CPT: PSP (2014).
MR Birtwistle^, DE Mager, JM Gallo. Mechanistic vs. Empirical Network Models of Drug Action. CPT: PSP (2013).
Birtwistle MR, Rauch J, Kiyatkin A, Aksamitiene E, Dobrzynski M, Hoek JB, Kolch W, Ogunnaike BA, and Kholodenko BN. Emergence of bimodal cell population responses from the interplay between analog single-cell signaling and protein expression noise. BMC Syst Biol 109(6) (2012).
Nakakuki, T*, Birtwistle, MR*, Saeki, Y, Yumoto, N, Nagashima, T, Brusch, L, Ogunnaike, BA, Hatakeyama, M, Kholodenko, BN. Ligand specificity of c-Fos expression emerges from spatiotemporal control of ErbB network dynamics. Cell 141(5), 884 (2010)
Sturm, O*, Orton, R*, Grindlay, J*, Birtwistle, MR, Vyshemirsky, V, Gilbert, D, Calder, M, Pitt, A, Kholodenko, B and Kolch, W. The mammalian MAPK/ERK pathway exhibits properties of a negative feedback amplifier. Sci Signal 3(153), (2010)
Kriegsheim, AV, Baiocchi, D*, Birtwistle, MR*, Sumpton, D, Bienvenut, W, Morrice, N, Yamada, K, Lamond, A, Kalna, G, Orton, R, Gilbert, D and Kolch, W. Cell fate decisions are specified by the dynamic ERK interactome. Nat. Cell Biol. 11, 1458 (2009)
Birtwistle, MR*, Hatakeyama, M*, Yumoto, N, Ogunnaike, BA, Hoek, JB, Kholodenko, BN. Ligand-dependent responses of the ErbB signaling network: experimental and modeling analyses. Mol Syst Biol 3, 144 (2007).