[5] He was the first to show how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells,[6] leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells.
Since then, his laboratory has contributed to the development of synthetic biological circuits that perform a range of functions inside cells, and revealed biological circuit design principles underlying epigenetic memory, cell fate control, cell-cell communication, and multicellular behaviors.
[7] His laboratory studies the dynamics of genetic circuits in individual living cells using synthetic biology, time-lapse microscopy, and mathematical modeling, with a particular focus on the way in which cells make use of noise to implement behaviors that would be difficult or impossible without it.
Recently, his lab has expanded their approaches beyond bacteria to include eukaryotic and mammalian cells.
While working as a graduate student at Princeton he co-authored songs such as Sunday at the Lab[11] with Uri Alon.