St. Paul, MN 55105 USA B.A. Swarthmore College, M.S. Stanford University, M.S. Harvard University, Ph.D. Harvard University Curriculum Vitae Preprints Summer Research Opportunities for Undergraduates Summer research positions are available to interested students. Stipend support and housing is available from sources such as the Hughes Program and the Keck Program. Contact D. Kaplan for more information.
Many physiological systems show variability that appears to be irregular and random.
Traditionally, such variability is ascribed to changes in the environment of the organism or to changes in activity level. It is now known, however, that nonlinearities in control systems can lead to oscillations that are generated internally. Since physiological systems are invariably nonlinear, physiological variability may contain important information about how the organism is functioning. There are several active research projects along these lines. We are developing simple measures of variability that can be used to probe for interesting structure in heart rate data.