Participating Faculty

• Philippe Cluzel (FAS Center for Systems Biology; Molecular and Cellular Biology; Engineering and Applied Sciences) focuses on real-time systems analysis of signal transduction and genetic networks in single cells.
• Adam Cohen (Chemistry and Chemical Biology; Physics) develops new physical tools to probe biological molecules and uses these tools to make new measurements.
• Michael Desai (FAS Center for Systems Biology; Organismic and Evolutionary Biology; Physics) uses a combination of theory and experiments to study the dynamics and population genetics of natural selection in asexual populations such as microbes and viruses.
• Erel Levine (Physics) asks how high-order organization emerges from molecular organization, and how organization at the level of individual cells or organisms dictates the organization of a complex biological system. Theoretical methods of equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics are employed hand-in-hand with quantitative experimental tools.
• Vinothan Manoharan (Engineering and Applied Science; Physics) uses various experimental techniques to study the physics of soft matter systems, including colloidal suspensions, gels, protein assemblies, viruses and cells.
• Eric Mazur (PI) (Engineering and Applied Sciences, Physics) combines techniques and expertise from physics and life sciences for advancing fundamental knowledge and developing new tools for the life sciences.
• Andrew Murray (FAS Center for Systems Biology; Molecular and Cellular Biology) uses budding yeast to look for general principles that underlie the function and evolution of cells, as revealed by studying the transmission of genetic information during cell division, mating, and how cells evolve in response to selective pressure.
• Daniel Needleman (FAS Center for Systems Biology, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Molecular and Cellular Biology) combines quantitative experiments and theory to study the architecture and dynamics of self-organizing subcellular structures. He currently focuses on the spindle, the self-organized structure that segregates chromosomes during cell division.
• David Nelson (Physics; Molecular and Cellular Biology) focused on problems that bridge the gap between the physical and biological sciences, for example the genetic demixing phenomenon at the frontier of growing yeast and bacterial colonies.
• Sharad Ramanathan (FAS Center for Systems Biology; Molecular and Cellular Biology; Engineering and Applied Sciences) studies the dynamics of signaling and transcriptional networks in single cells.
• Aravi Samuel (Physics) takes a biophysical approach to understanding brain and behavior in simple animals like C. elegans and Drosophila larva.