Debusschere earns honors
for sorting out uncertainty
Posted April 24, 2009
Bert Debusschere digs around in some messy stuff. He looks for ways to understand chemical and biochemical reactions that are highly variable, hard to distinguish from background activity and often sensitive to small changes in conditions. The data rarely are neat and clean; instead, they're consistently inconsistent.
Nonetheless, they're important reactions – parts of networks governing gene regulation, the human immune system and catalysis in fuel cells and batteries. If we can decipher these stochastic reaction networks, there could be big rewards, such as improved energy efficiency, new disease treatments and better environmental remediation methods.
Debusschere, a staff member at Sandia National Laboratories' Transportation Energy Center in Livermore, Calif., develops computational and mathematical methods to study these hard-to-characterize systems. For his work, Debusschere was one of 68 researchers to receive the 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, presented at a White House ceremony in December 2008.
The award also recognizes Debusschere's work with the Sandia Diversity Council and Foreign National Networking Group – but omits the nonprofit canine rescue operation that takes up most of his off-work hours. See sidebar.
Debusschere's group already is working with a biomedical researcher to apply its methods to immune system signaling pathways. But, he says: "The work we're doing is really on a very fundamental methodology level. We're probably a couple years away from having this in every biochemist's toolbox, but it's making its way over there."
Debusschere received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in his native Belgium before earning master's and doctoral degrees in the same subject at the University of Wisconsin. He specialized in computational fluid dynamics with direct numerical simulations of scalar transport in reacting flows.
When he first arrived at Sandia in 2001, Debusschere researched ways to assess the uncertainty in models of the fluid flows behind combustion and similar processes. On the large scale, so many reactions occur in these systems that the models are mostly deterministic, with a clearly defined path, and scientists have good tools for analyzing them.
Debusschere soon became intrigued by biological system models, which can confound tools used to analyze uncertainty in deterministic models.
