William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics,
and a member of the multidisciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics,
at Princeton University.
In
addition, he serves as Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics at the
Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he is helping to launch an Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences. Professor
Bialek can be reached through his assistant at Princeton, Mr Lee Morgan
(609-258-0859). For matters
related to ITS @ The Graduate Center, please email its@gc.cuny.edu. |
Photo by D. Applewhite,
Princeton University |
Research Interests
I
am interested in the interface between physics and biology, broadly
interpreted. A central theme in my
research is an appreciation for how well things ÒworkÓ in biological
systems. It is, after all, some
notion of functional behavior that distinguishes life from inanimate matter,
and it is a challenge to quantify this functionality in a language that
parallels our characterization of other physical systems. Strikingly, when we do this (and there
are not so many cases where it has been done!), the performance of biological
systems often approaches some limits set by basic physical principles. While it
is popular to view biological mechanisms as an historical record of
evolutionary and developmental compromises, these observations on functional
performance point toward a very different view of life as having selected a set
of near optimal mechanisms for its most crucial tasks. Even if this view is
wrong, it suggests a theoretical physicist's idealization; the construction of
this idealization and the attempt to calibrate the performance of real
biological systems against this ideal provides a productive route for the
interaction of theory and experiment, and in several cases this effort has led
to the discovery of new phenomena.
The idea of performance near the physical limits crosses many levels of
biological organization, from single molecules to cells to perception and
learning in the brain, and I have tried to contribute to this whole range of
problems.
To
find out more:
A complete
list of publications, with links to pdf files of
most papers.
Publications
organized by research topic, with links to commentaries (needs to be
updated!).
Some favorite
papers, with commentary (in pdf; also needs
updating)
Teaching
Spring 2012: PHY 562 Biophysics
Fall 2011: ISC/CHM/COS/MOL/PHY
231/2. An
integrated, quantitative introduction to the natural sciences
From previous years, shorter courses at the
University of Rome:
Some current
theoretical issues in biophysics: A short course (2010)
A short course on
theoretical problems in biophysics (2008)
Recent lectures
Usually I enjoy lecturing on the blackboard, which allows
for spontaneity but leaves no written record. For some larger venues I do use prepared graphics,
however. Here are links to some
(fairly) recent ones É
Statistical mechanics for real biological networks. This is a reasonably
technical seminar, which I tried to give with slides rather than just on the
blackboard, on the excuse that details of the data mattered. I still like the blackboard versions
better, but at least this leaves a record. It has evolved over the year, this version from a colloquium
at the Santa Fe Institute (27 Oct 2011).
More perfect than we imagined: A physicistÕs view of life. This was a public lecture at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York (3 Nov 2010). We got a little free advertizing in an
excellent article
by Natalie Angier. There is even a
video
of lecture itself.
Some
adventures in teaching at the interface of physics and biology. This is a lecture I have given in
several venues, updated as we progress through our experiment with the
integrated science course. This
version was at Math for America (17 Sep 2011).