Yuka Suzuki

Professional scope and motivations

As a researcher, I'm interested in understanding how complex (biological) systems are organised. I studied biology in my undergraduate program and ecology in Ph.D.

Questions that interest me are: e.g. what kinds of constraints exist? how do they maintain and drive complex biological systems and dynamics?

I also enjoy synthesising ideas and organise data, to create some order in complexity.

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More generally, I am interested in understanding dynamics and organisation that allows creativity and diversity. That could be about systems in biology and ecology as well as the R&D system in the world.

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Postdoc project

In the field of genetics, genetic data is becoming more and more available. However, it seems that our understanding of biological systems could be improved so much more if we could analyze genetics data better. Method development is one of the potential direction of improvements. I'm working on understanding different methods so that we can utilise them more effectively. Another crucial key for an improvement seems to be putting the genetics into the context, the context of other things we know such as metabolic pathways, organs, and tissues. Linking genetic data with data at different scales this way should help us understand the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes. The genotype-phenotype relationships are complex network data. Analyzing them may reveal some unknown constraints that regulate the complex but organized dynamics in biology.

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PhD Thesis

There are many coral communities in the ocean. They are not randomly scattered. Rather, one can find many hotspots, whereas in many other places, corals are rarely found. Coral larvae float in the ocean to some nearby locations and sometimes disperse to a little bit farther. They may leave where they originate, and settle into somewhere completely different depending on the ocean current. If there is no ocean current that carries corals, and you look at two different populations such as Okinawa and Hawaii. Are they the same species? Most likely no. Each population must have evolved into a unique species. But in nature, ocean currents run and carry corals. Some individuals in Okinawa and Hawaii may be the same species and some others may not. 
Now the question is how many species can coexist in the ocean? If every part of the ocean is completely mixed, no speciation happens or closely related species keep mixing, so not so many species can exist. But if ocean is separated into many different parts and migration rarely happens between them, then each part might establish a unique species, but some part may be so poor in resources, and once some parts go extinct, those populations there will be lost forever. So, it sounds that some intermediate level of migration is the best and can sustain the maximum number of species.. Is that true? And which condition is the best? How often the migration should be? How many different parts should we have? Which dispersal path is important? ....

To answer these questions, I'm studying the relationship between the network structure of the migration and biodiversity.