John Goutsias, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is known for developing novel techniques for the modeling and analysis of stochasticity in biological systems. His research interests encompass computational epigenetics and systems biology, bioinformatics, genomic signal processing, and image analysis.
Goutsias has pursued a number of projects to understand complexity in Markovian Interaction Networks. An example of this effort is a collaborative project on characterizing and synthetically constructing hydrogels and RNA granules in living cells in an inducible manner. This work resulted in the first-ever protein hydrogels made in living cells, which could ultimately be used to better understand diseases, such as ALS. He is currently working on the development of advanced methods for the modeling and analysis of epigenetic information and chromatin organization in cells, with the objective to better understand epigenetic dysregulation in human diseases such as cancer.
His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Since 1986, he has published more than 130 academic articles and abstracts in refereed journals, conference proceedings, and books. He has also served as editor of the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, associate and guest editor for several IEEE Journals (Transactions), and as an associate editor for the EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology.
He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1980. He went on to earn an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1982 and 1986, respectively. Goutsias joined Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor in 1986. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of his studies, he holds additional appointments in JHU’s departments of Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mathematics and Statistics.