Theoretical Physics of Life
The broedersz studies the Physics of Life. We use a theoretical physics perspective to uncover the fundamental principles of living systems. The functionality of biological systems, such as chromosomes or motile cells, depends on their organization and dynamics. Understanding how this functional behavior emerges is a major challenge for physics. These constitute many-body systems, typically operating far from thermal equilibrium.
Our research is inspired by the overarching question:
How does functional behavior in biological systems emerge from the collective dynamics of their interacting constituents?
By combining approaches from theoretical physics with stochastic inference and machine learning, we strive to understand how processes down to the protein level control emergent functional behavior at larger scales. Recently, there has been a surge in the production of high-quality quantitative data on biological systems, such as chromosome capture experiments on bacteria or time-lapse microcopy experiments of the cytoskeletal machinery of migrating cells. These data reveal intricate stochastic dynamics and striking organizational features, but it is challenging to interpret such behaviors. We seek to unravel such complex data to uncover the physics underlying the organization and dynamics of biological systems directly from experiments. In addition to our work on bottom-up theoretical approaches, we therefore also invest strongly in data-driven theoretical approaches. We develop approaches to infer the large-scale organization of the bacterial chromosome from Hi-C data, determine the dynamics of confined cell migration, and to extract non-equilibrium information by monitoring the stochastic dynamics of living systems.
