About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR), an interdisciplinary lab that is associated with both the informatics and biology departments at the University of Sussex.

I am exploring the dynamics that are made possible by having a self-producing organisation. The property of self-production has been proposed by many (Varela, Rosen, Kauffman) to be a fundamental property of life. In my thesis I build upon work done by Ruiz-Mirazo, Ikegami and Suzuki and others to explore what abilities this property provides. If life is first and foremost self-producing -- how does this make life different from non-life? What can autopoietic organisms do that allopoietic systems (e.g. robots) can not?

My work at the moment is focused around developing computational models of self-producing systems. These have thus far taken the form of artificial chemistries, simulations of bacterial behaviour, and extensions of models of autopoietic systems.