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William Bialek
Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics, and the Lewis–Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics Princeton University Professor Bialek can be reached through his assistant,
Ms Amie Weisert, aweisert@Princeton.EDU
or 609-258-7014. |
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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
Currently on sabbatical at the University of Rome, La
Sapienza.
A short course on
theoretical problems in biophysics
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
More perfect than we imagined: A physicistÕs view of life.
This was a public lecture in the Science on Saturday
series, sponsored by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Aimed at high school students, I tried
to give an overview of ideas about optimization and the physical limits to
various biological functions, from the regulation of gene expression in
embryonic development to reasoning about randomness.
Optimization
principles in neural coding and computation. This was a tutorial lecture (2 hrs) at the annual conference
on Neural Information Processing Systems, held in Vancouver, December
2004. For more information about
the conference series see http://nips.cc/ . I gave a related talk
(shorter, with slightly different emphasis) at the new Crick-Jacobs Center for
Theoretical Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
From photons
to perception: A physicist looks
at the brain. This was the 25th
public lecture at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara,
delivered 1 September 2004. The
link is to an online version of the talk, with audio. For more about the KITP (including its public lecture
series) see http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/ .
The
other half of western civilization:
Communicating a mathematical view of nature. This was part of a symposium on
quantitative education in the biological sciences, held in December 2004. David Botstein and I described our
progress thus far in teaching an integrated introductory science curriculum
(CHM/COS/MOL/PHY 231-4).