Jeremy Gunawardena

Gunawardena received a BSc degree in mathematics from Imperial College, London, where he was awarded the Sir John Lubbock Memorial Prize for the highest-ranked first class degree in the University of London.^[6] He did Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, for which he was awarded a J T Knight Prize in Class 1, and went on to do his PhD in algebraic topology with Frank Adams at Cambridge.^[7]

He was elected to a research fellowship in Pure Mathematics at Trinity College.^[8][9] Before taking up his Fellowship, he spent two years as L.E. Dickson Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago.^[10] He subsequently spent several years in industrial research at HP Labs in Bristol, UK.^[11][12] He also served as a Member of Council of the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).^[13] In 2002, Gunawardena become a Visiting Scientist at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard.^[14] In 2003, he joined the newly formed Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.^[15] In 2025, he moved to the Universitat Pompeo Fabra as a Distinguished Professor.

Gunawardena's PhD thesis led to the solution, with Frank Adams and Haynes Miller, of the Segal conjecture for elementary abelian groups,^[16] which provided the algebraic starting point for Gunnar Carlsson's solution of the full conjecture.^[17] At the University of Chicago, he helped to set up the first computer science courses at the University.^[18] At HP Labs, Gunawardena created the Basic Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences (BRIMS), a pioneering academic-industrial partnership with the University of Bristol and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge.^[19][20]

One of his most cited papers, "Multisite protein phosphorylation makes a good threshold but can be a poor switch" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ^[21] has received 280 citations according to Google Scholar.^[22]

Gunawardena introduced, with Aneil Mallavarapu, the programming-with-models approach to virtual cells, which led to the programming language little b.^[23]Together with Marc Kirschner, Lew Cantley, Walter Fontana and Johan Paulsson, he helped set up and co-taught Systems Biology 200, one of the first courses to discuss the core mathematical ideas needed in systems biology.^[24] He also founded the weekly series of Theory Lunch chalk talks, which has been running since 2003 and has brought some of the culture of the mathematical sciences into systems biology.^[25]

At Harvard Medical School, Gunawardena's lab studies information processing in eukaryotic cells, with a focus on mechanisms like post-translational modification, gene regulation and allostery.^[26] Gunawardena has had a long-standing interest in the interface between mathematics and biology, on which he has written several perspectives.^[27] Gunawardena's essay, "Models in biology: 'accurate descriptions of our pathetic thinking'," published in BMC Biology, critiques the limitations of mathematical models in biological research.^[28] He argues that many models fail to accurately represent nature and emphasizes the importance of verifiability and falsifiability in their components and conclusions.^[29]

Gunawardena's lab has developed over several years a mathematical approach for analyzing biomolecular systems called the 'linear framework in which theorems can be proved about biological processes.^[30]

Gunawardena has been exploring the concept of cellular learning, bringing ideas from cognitive science and psychology to bear on the behavior of individual cells.^[31] He was awarded a European Research Council synergy grant to study this, 'CeLEARN: learning in single cells through dynamical internal representations', together with Aneta Koseska, Dietmar Schmucker and Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo.^[32]