Katie Bentley

Dr. Katie Bentley is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at King’s College London’s Department of Informatics, part of the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences. She leads the Cellular Adaptive Behaviour Lab at the Francis Crick Institute, focusing on computational modeling of cell behavior in developmental and disease contexts. Her work integrates agent-based simulations with experimental biology to study collective cell dynamics, particularly in angiogenesis and vascular diseases like cancer and retinopathy.

Research Interests: Computational biology, agent-based modeling, systems biology, cell-cell signaling (Notch/Delta), vascular development, and disease modeling. She applies computational methods to understand how individual cell behaviors lead to emergent tissue-level patterns.

Recent Work: Recent studies include modeling Notch signaling’s role in blood-brain barrier formation (2024), mechanoregulation of angiogenesis via YAP/TAZ (2024), and Bmp9’s regulation of angiogenesis (2023). She has also developed pandemic models like OpenABM-Covid19 (2021) and investigated vascular permeability in diabetic retinopathy (2019).

Awards: None explicitly listed in provided text.

Advising & Grants: Supervised at least one doctoral student (Nitzsche, A.) on vascular biology topics. Active in interdisciplinary collaborations across bioengineering, computational science, and experimental biology.

Labs/Teams: Leads the Cellular Adaptive Behaviour Lab (Crick Institute) and collaborates with institutions like UCL, Imperial College London, and international partners in computational biology.