William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle
Professor in Physics,
Associate Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics,
and a Faculty Fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science,
all at Princeton University.
In addition, he serves as Visiting Presidential Professor
of Physics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York Professor
Bialek can be reached through his assistant, Ms Barbara Brinker 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
Fall
2009: ISC/CHM/COS/MOL/PHY
231/2. An
integrated, quantitative introduction to the natural sciences
Spring
2009: PHY
562. Biophysics
During
a sabbatical at the University of Rome, La Sapienza (Spring 2008): 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
The other half of western
civilization: An experiment in
freshman science teaching. This was a keynote lecture for the American
Society of Cell Biology in December 2007.
In many ways itÕs an update of the talk given three years before (see
below), with the benefit of much more experience. You can also see a video of the lecture, and various
introductory remarks at the conference, here.
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).