Lecturer: Prof. Terry Hwa
Affiliation: Department of Physics,
University of California at San Diego
Abstract:
Many physicists have turned to the study of
biological phenomena in the past decade.
Methods of statistical physics have proven to
be helpful in solving a variety of biological
problems; at the same time biological systems
have presented many challenges to stimulate
new approaches to studying complex systems.
In this talk, I will describe a few of the many
examples encountered during the course of my
personal exploration in biology. At the
molecular scale, a maximum entropy principle
turns variations in the sequence composition of
related proteins into a procedure to inform the
prediction of protein structures and protein-
protein interactions. At the cellular level,
discovery and application of
phenomenological growth laws lead to
quantitatively accurate predictions on bacterial
response to genetic and environmental
perturbations. At the population level, physical
expansion of population and tissue open up
simple dynamic mechanisms to generate
spatiotemporal patterns.