Ty Thomson

Personal

Bio

Born in Toronto in 1979. Grew up there, and attended the University of Toronto (UofT, not to be confused with UT, which is some school in texas I hear). Graduated in 2002 with a BASc (BASc = bachelor of applied science = canadian engineering degree) in Biomedical Engineering from the Engineering Science program. For 3 summers in undergrad I worked for MDS Proteomics (which changed names to Protana Inc, and was bought out by Transition Therapeutics). I started grad school at MIT in Biological Engineering (BE) in the fall of 2002. In January of 2003 I joined Drew Endy's lab. I mainly joined his lab cause he seemed to be the craziest and most outside-of-the-box faculty member in BE. I have been loosely involved in the synthetic biology community here (although my research is not really synth bio related), including the sythetic biology working group, and I helped organize Synthetic Biology 1.0. I am somehow on the OWW steering committee, despite the fact that I rarely use OWW. I seem to be the skeptic/realist in the group, which is needed 'cause I work with a bunch of optimistic hippies.

Ty on the Sam Adams brewery tour

Hobbies

• Beer brewing
• Snowboarding
• Mountain biking
• Playing various team sports - hockey, football, softball (if that counts as a 'sport')

...I must have other hobbies... Am I really that lame?

Things I'm good at that aren't quite hobbies

• Sleeping
• Washing dishes

Contact

Address
31 Ames St.
68-570
Cambridge, MA 02139
Email Address
tmt -at- mit -dot- edu
Phone Number
617.258.8684

Science

Interests

• Modeling
• Parameter sensitivity/identifiability
• Microfluidics
• Yeast pheromone response

Thesis Project

Characterization of Signaling Pathways Using Time-Varying Stimuli

Near Future Plan and Notes

Publications

• Stewart, I. I., Thomson, T., Figeys, D., and Duewel, H. S. (2003). "The Use of 18O Labeling as a Tool for Proteomic Applications", Handbook of Proteomic Methods, Edited by P. Michael Conn. Chapter 11, pages 145-179. (Totowa, New Jersey: Humana Press Inc.)
• Stewart, I. I., Thomson, T., and Figeys, D. (2001). 18O labeling: a tool for proteomics. Rapid Commun. Mass. Spectrom. 15, 2456-2465 link on Pubmed