Himanshu Agrawal

Joining the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1986, I completed B.Tech., M.Tech., and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering to leave in 1998. This long winding road had little spatial delocalization.

Ph.D. followed a study of self-organized criticality via loop-erased random walks at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. This followed a brief study stay at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. Exposure to biological thought occurred here. Working on clustering of gene expression data and learning "Biology for Non-Biologists" led to a dramatic change incorporating significant biology in the thought. Simultaneous exposure to ongoing rapid developments in networks led to hybridization among contrasting areas and consequent work on construction and analysis of "synthetic gene networks" using gene expression and other available biological data. This hybridization resulted in a result or two of importance to biology. The most important result was a support of the biologically accepted hypothesis, without isolating the affected genes, that cancer originates from accumulation of mutations in few genes that form the hubs of regulatory pathways.

Currently I am in the School of Information Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My broad interest lies in multidisciplinary research bordering between physics and biology, bioinformatics, biophysics, and statistical physics. Specific emphasis in my efforts is on employing and extending the methods of statistical physics for overcoming the challenges posed by highly ill posed and severely constrained problem of identifying the genetic networks forming the regulatory core of complex biological systems. The perspective of my studies being understanding aspects of organization in biological systems, genetic aspects of evolution, and cancer genetics. During the tenure of my International Fellowship I hope to extend my work in biology.

Published Research

T. Rozovskaia, O. Ravid-Amir, S. Tillib, G. Getz, E. Feinstein, H. AGRAWAL, A. Nagler, E. F. Rappaport, I. Issaeva, Y. Matsuo, U. R. Kees, T. Lapidot, F. Lo Coco, R. Foa, A. Mazo, T. Nakamura, C. M. Croce, G. Cimino, E. Domany, and E. Canaani. "Expression profiles of acute lymphoblastic and myeloblastic leukemias with ALL-1 rearrangements." Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 7853 (2003). [PDF] 495 KB

Himanshu Agrawal and Eytan Domany. "Potts ferromagnets on coexpressed gene networks: Identifying maximally stable partitions." Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 158102 (2003); erratum ibid. 90, 229901 (2003). [PDF] 127 KB

Himanshu Agrawal. "Extreme self-organization in networks constructed from gene expression data." Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 268702 (2002); arXiv.org/cond-mat/0207409. [PDF] 252 KB

Himanshu Agrawal and Deepak Dhar. "Probability distribution of the sizes of the largest erased loops in loop-erased random walks." Phys. Rev. E 65, 031108 (2002); arXiv.org/cond-mat/0107246; TIFR preprint number TIFR/TH/01-18. [PDF] 123 KB

Himanshu Agrawal and Deepak Dhar. "Distribution of sizes of erased loops of loop-erased random walks in two and three dimensions." Phys. Rev. E 63, 056115 (2001); arXiv.org/cond-mat/0012102; TIFR preprint number TIFR/TH/00-62. [PDF] 109 KB