William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics
at Princeton University. He also is a member of the multidisciplinary
Lewis–Sigler Institute. In addition to his responsibilities at Princeton,
he is Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, where is helping to launch an Initiative for the
Theoretical Sciences.
Born in 1960 and educated in the San Francisco public schools,
Bialek graduated from Lowell High School in 1977. He attended the
University of California at Berkeley, receiving the AB (1979) and PhD (1983) degrees
in Biophysics. After postdoctoral appointments at the Rijksuniversiteit
Groningen in the Netherlands and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Santa Barbara, he returned to Berkeley to join the faculty in 1986. In
late 1990 he moved to the newly formed NEC Research Institute (now the NEC
Laboratories) in Princeton, where he eventually became an Institute Fellow.
During his years at NEC, Bialek also made extended visits for research
and teaching at many institutions around the world, including the University of
California at San Francisco, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Scuola Internazionale
Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, and Princeton University; he
joined the Princeton faculty as Professor of Physics in 2001. In Spring
2008 he spent a sabbatical at the University of Rome, La Sapienza.
Professor BialekÕs research interests have ranged over a wide
variety of theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology, from the
dynamics of individual biological molecules to learning and cognition. Best
known for contributions to our understanding of coding and computation in the
brain, Bialek and collaborators have shown that aspects of brain function can
be described as essentially optimal strategies for adapting to the complex
dynamics of the world, making the most of the available signals in the face of
fundamental physical constraints and limitations. More recently he
has followed these ideas of optimization into the early events of embryonic
development, and the processes by which all cells make decisions about when to
read out the information stored in their genes. His hope is that these diverse
biological phenomena may be understandable through some unifying theoretical
principles, in the physics tradition.
Throughout his career Bialek has been involved both in helping to establish
biophysics as a sub-discipline within physics and in helping biology to absorb
the quantitative intellectual tradition of the physical sciences. During his
years at NEC he organized the Princeton Lectures on Biophysics, a series of
workshops that provided many young physicists with an introduction to the challenges
and opportunities at the interface with biology. For more than twenty
years Professor Bialek has participated in summer courses at the Marine
Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, serving as co-director of
the computational neuroscience course in the summers of 1998 through 2002. Currently
he is involved in a major educational experiment at Princeton to create a truly
integrated and mathematically sophisticated introduction to the natural
sciences for first year college students.