I will be starting an experimental research group in the Spring semester of 2009; please do contact me now if you are interested in starting research with me at that time.

My primary research interest is the interface between physics and biology with the goal of understanding what part of biology can be framed in the traditional language of physics, i.e. explain a broad range of biological phenomena with a few simple mathematical formulations. We know, for example, that physical laws constrain in fundamental ways processes such as computational reliabilty and memory capacity in machines, and we would like to ask in what form similar constraints apply to living organisms. The processes that give rise to biological functions, subject to evolution through natural selection, are natural collective phenomena. Therefore rather than focussing on the scale of the molecule, we focus on the systems scale of the cell, developing mathematical descriptions as well as experimental techniques for high-precision measurements that constrain and guide such theoretical models.

The experimental techniques include both the development of microscopes and microfluidic devices as well as tools from molecular biology and genetics to manipulate the studied organisms. Our model systems are the developing fruit fly embryo, where we focus on a quantitative description of its initial stages when the spatio- temporal structure of the future adult fly is determined; and amoeba populations where we look at the origin of emergent collective behavior induced via cell signaling. My laboratory will be on the first floor of Jadwin Hall. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you are a potentially interested undergraduate student, graduate student, postdoc, or collaborator.

For more information please visit my laboratory's homepage

• Stability and nuclear dynamics of the Bicoid morphogen gradient. Cell 130, p. 153 (2007)
• Probing the limits to positional information. Cell 130, p. 164 (2007)
• Diffusion and scaling during early embryonic pattern formation. PNAS 102, p. 18403 (2005)