The $R^3$ Lab

We develop a Science of Regulation that unifies how regulatory systems—from transcription factors to legal codes—grow, diversify, and remain robust across Biology and Society.

Regulation shows up at every scale: transcription factors coordinate genes inside cells, nervous systems coordinate organs, and laws coordinate people. It always costs something—energy, labor, resources—but buys stability in return. The $R^3$ Lab asks how far that analogy goes, through three questions:

• How do regulatory systems grow, from a handful of rules to sprawling interconnected networks?
• How does the diversity they regulate arise—and can one model explain it across systems as different as proteomes and cities?
• How do regulatory systems stay robust to noise, both the random kind inside cells and the unpredictable kind in the outside world?

James Holehouse, the PI, is an assistant professor at WashU’s department of Biology, having joined the department in Fall 2026 after a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also the curator of the Sports Rules Project, an ongoing catalogue of how sports rulebooks evolve—one of the unusual data sources that motivates the Lab’s cross-domain approach to regulation. The Lab is actively recruiting PhD students and Postdocs from Comp Bio, Math Bio, Evo Bio, Applied Math, and Statistical Physics backgrounds—please see here!