We’re thrilled to announce that our Ph.D. student, Joshua Petrack, has been awarded the Excellent Student/Postdoc Poster Award at the 31st International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA31), held August 25–29, 2025 in Lyon, France.
Joshua’s poster showcased groundbreaking work titled:
“Exactly simulating stochastic chemical reaction networks in sub-constant time per reaction” – Joshua Petrack and David Doty
This research tackles a long-standing challenge in simulating chemical reaction networks (CRNs), a foundational model in systems biology and molecular programming. Traditional simulation methods like the Gillespie algorithm require linear time in the number of reactions. Joshua and Professor Doty’s work introduces the first exact stochastic simulation algorithm that achieves sublinear time per reaction, while preserving the precise dynamics of CRNs.
By adapting and extending techniques from distributed computing—specifically population protocols—their algorithm achieves remarkable theoretical and practical performance, with implementations in Python and Rust demonstrating impressive speedups.
The award recognizes not only the technical depth and innovation of the work, but also Joshua’s clarity in presenting complex ideas to a diverse audience of computer scientists, chemists, and molecular engineers.
We’re incredibly proud of Joshua’s achievement and excited to see how this work will shape future research in molecular-scale computation and simulation.