|
William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle
Professor in Physics, a member of
the Lewis-Sigler Institute for
Integartive Genomics, and a Faculty Fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical
Science, all at Princeton University.
In addition, he serves as a Visiting
Professor in the Center for
Studies in Physics and Biology at the Rockefeller University.
To reach Professor Bialek: At Princeton, please contact Ms Barbara Brinker, (609) 258-7014. At Rockefeller, please contact Ms Melanie Lee, (212) 327-8544 |
|
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 2009: PHY 562. Biophysics
Fall 2008: ISC/CHM/COS/MOL/PHY 231/2. An integrated,
quantitative introduction to the natural sciences
Also, at Rockefeller a course for PhD students: Signals, noise
and information
Spring 2008: I was on sabbatical at the University of
Rome, La Sapienza, where I taught 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/ .