Making Sense of Life’s Mysteries

Have you ever watched birds flying in perfect V-shapes, or seen a school of fish move together like they’re one big creature? It’s kind of magical, right? But here’s the amazing part: no one is in charge of those animals. They just know what to do, together! How?

This is the question we are trying to answer in the Raman Lab at the University of Chicago.

Most science works by breaking things into smaller pieces—like taking apart a toy to see how it works. This is called ‘reductionism’, and it’s helped us understand a lot about the world.

But sometimes, that just doesn’t work.

If you study one bird, or one ant, or even one human cell, you miss the bigger picture.

That’s because some things only make sense when you look at the group, not just the parts that make up the group. This is called ‘emergence’—when something amazing happens just because a lot of simple things are working together and interacting in exactly the precise, right way.

Right now, we don’t know why this happens or how this happens. We can’t predict when it will happen, and we definitely don’t know how to build systems like that ourselves. This is the scientific mystery.

In the Raman Lab, we mix biology, physics, math, and computer science to study emergence from all angles. We want to understand how these patterns come to define life as we know it and ultimately, maybe learn how to create our own patterns. Because once we crack that code we could build smarter systems, better medicines, or even new forms of life-like machines. The possibilities are endless.

We don’t just want to watch cool videos of birds flying in sync—we want to understand the science behind the magic.

Learning emergence from statistics

Published in eLife in 2022 What if we could uncover organizing principles of biology not by cataloguing every gene or molecule, but by learning from the statistical structure of the system itself? In the first paper from our lab we showed that the hierarchy of genomic...

Welcome to the Raman Lab.

Hello! If you look around our site, you’ll see a lot of different stuff about Biology. But really, we study just one thing. How nature builds complexity. And how we can learn from it. We believe that the most elegant solutions in science don’t come from reducing...