Boulder School 2019: Theoretical Biophysics

July 8-26, 2019

Scientific Coordinators

Thierry Mora (ENS, CNRS)
Ilya Nemenman (Emory)
Greg J Stephens (OIST & VU Amsterdam)
Aleksandra Walczak (ENS, CNRS)

Director: Leo Radzihovsky (CU Boulder)

From the point of view of physics, biological systems stand out due to their complexity and heterogeneity. Living systems span many length and timescales, and are constantly kept out of equilibrium by active energy-consuming processes. Understanding their functioning poses a major challenge to traditional physical approaches. It is often difficult to predict the overall behavior of a biological system just from knowing, often partially, the behavior of their individual components. Can we understand how a cell tissue collectively moves in response to an external stimuli, merely based on the contacts between neighboring cells? Similarly, can one predict how a swarm of birds or insects react to a threat? On another scale, how do interactions between pairs of amino acids in a protein determine its function? How does a neural network encode information about the collective activity of these cells? Can we predict the next dominant strain of influenza by studying its evolution in response to immune defenses of infected populations? Despite their diversity, these questions have in common the emergence of a global and collective phenomenon from a collection of local interactions. The 2019 Boulder Summer School will explore recent theoretical inroads into these and related questions.

Group Photo

Public Lecture

Prof. Leonid Mirny (MIT), “Human genome: Now in 3D!” in Duane Physics Building, Room G1B30 on Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 7:00pm.

Lecturers and seminar speakers