[18][19] At Harvard Medical School, Gunawardena's lab studies information processing in eukaryotic cells, with a focus on mechanisms like post-translational modification, gene regulation and allostery.
[23] Gunawardena's lab has developed over several years a mathematical approach for analyzing biomolecular systems called the 'linear framework in which theorems can be proved about biological processes.
[24] Gunawardena has been exploring the concept of cellular learning, bringing ideas from cognitive science and psychology to bear on the behavior of individual cells.
[25] He was awarded a European Research Council synergy grant to study this, 'CeLEARN: learning in single cells through dynamical internal representations', together with Aneta Koseska, Dietmar Schmucker and Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo.
[26] One of his most cited papers, "Multisite protein phosphorylation makes a good threshold but can be a poor switch" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [27] has received 280 citations according to Google Scholar.