I am a postdoc in the Fuel Synthesis Division of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) studying why biofuel production is toxic to cells. I use efflux pumps to excrete fuel from the cell and am interesting in controlling expression of these transporters in response to fuel production.

Previously, I was a graduate student at Caltech in the Mechanical Engineering department where I studied how control systems (feedback and regulation) are implemented in molecular biology. My research is a combination of experimental work (in E. coli) and computational and theoretical modeling.

PhD, California Institute of Technology, 2008

Thesis: Dynamics and Correlated Noise in Gene Regulation (Thesis)

Advisors: Richard Murray and Michael Elowitz

MS, California Institute of Technology, 2004

Mechanical Engineering

BSE, Princeton University, 2002

Major: Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Minor: Computer Science

R. S. Cox, M. J. Dunlop, M. B. Elowitz. “A Synthetic Three-Color Reporter Framework for Monitoring Genetic Regulation and Noise.” (in review)
M. J. Dunlop, R. S. Cox, J. H. Levine, R. M. Murray, M. B. Elowitz. “Regulation Revealed by Dynamic Correlations In Gene Expression Noise.” Nature Genetics. 40:1493-1498, 2008.
M. E. Wall, M. J. Dunlop, W. S. Hlavacek. "Multiple Functions of a Feed-Forward Loop Gene Circuit." Journal of Molecular Biology. 349:501-514, 2005.

M. J. Dunlop, E. Franco, R. M. Murray. "A Multi-Model Approach to Identification of Biosynthetic Pathways." In Proceedings of the 26th American Control Conference 2007.
J. Ugander, M. J. Dunlop, R. M. Murray. "Analysis of a Digital Clock for Molecular Computing." In Proceedings of the 26th American Control Conference 2007.
M. J. Dunlop, M. E. Wall. "Robustness in Gene Circuits: Clustering of Functional Responses." In Proceedings of the 24th American Control Conference 2005.
M. B. Reiser, J. S. Humbert, M. J. Dunlop, D. Del Vecchio, R. M. Murray, M. H. Dickinson. "Vision as a Compensatory Mechanism for Disturbance Rejection in Upwind Flight." In Proceedings of the 23rd American Control Conference 2004.
T. Colonius, M. J. Dunlop, R. Reba, S. Narayanan. "A Study of the Role of Organized Structures in Jet Noise Generation." AIAA Paper 2003-3314. 2003.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Mail Stop 978-4121
Berkeley, CA 94720

E-mail: mjdunlop (at) lbl.gov