Taviare Hawkins

Mount Holyoke Fellow & Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics

My research has focused on implementing and extending the parallel cascade identification (PCI) algorithm, a nonlinear system identification method developed by Korenberg. I adapted this relatively new technique for two biophysical applications: sensory signal identification in the unicellular alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (a light-sensitive organism), and human gesture recognition used in wearable computing and human-computer interfacing. In the Chlamydomonas research, I wrote a computational toolkit, which was used to detect multi-rate cell signals. For the gesture recognition system, I built human-computer interfaces equipped with electromechanical sensors to capture gestures. I also extended the algorithm to run as a real-time multi-input single-output gesture recognition system. The computational nature of my research is well suited for interdisciplinary collaborations in biophysics, applied physics, biology, engineering, and computer science.