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, currently serving as its associate director.
Professor Bialek participates in the interdepartmental educational programs in
Applied and Computational Mathematics, Biophysics, Neuroscience, and
Quantitative and Computational Biology, and is an associated faculty member in
the Department of Molecular Biology. 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.
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 a dozen 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.