dr. Greg Stephens

Associate Professor, Faculty of Science, Physics of Living Systems

Associate Professor, LaserLaB, LaserLaB - Molecular Biophysics

Personal information

Greg J Stephens is an associate professor of physics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and an adjunct professor at OIST Graduate University in Japan, In 2022 he was selected as a fellow of the American Physical Society. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland with a dissertation in general relatively under the guidance of Bei-Lok Hu. He held postdoctoral positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory with Wojciech Zurek and Garret Kenyon, and, after a change in research direction to the physics of living systems, with William Bialek at Princeton University. Centered on organism-scale biophysics, his research combines dynamical systems, statistical physics and information theory to understand animals in natural motion.

Greg Stephens | Physics Living Systems | Department of Physics and Astronomy

Research

The Stephens Group is pioneering a new field – the physics of behavior: from individual organisms to entire societies. The science of the living world is overwhelmingly focused on the microscopic: the structure of DNA, the machinery of cells that can convert energy and transports materials, or the pattern of electrical activity in our brains from which thoughts arise. Yet, all of these processes serve the greater evolutionary goals of the organism: to find food, avoid predators and reproduce. This is the behavioral scale, and despite it’s importance, our quantitative understanding of behavior is much less advanced. But how do we quantify the emergent dynamics of entire organisms? What principles characterize living movement? Research in our group addresses these fundamental questions with a modern biophysics approach and model systems ranging from the nematode C. elegans to zebrafish and honeybee collectives. We combine theoretical ideas from statistical physics, information theory and dynamical systems and work in close collaboration with scientists from Amsterdam and around the world to develop and analyze novel, quantitative experiments of organisms in natural motion.

Teaching

Greg is chair of the Examination Board of Medical and Natural Sciences program at the VU and a member of the Examination Board of the VU-UvA BSc and MS joint program in Physics & Astronomy. He teaches the following classes:

Physics of Complex Systems: Dynamics and Chaos

The Many Modern Faces of Entropy

Statistical Mechanics (Amsterdam University College)

Ancillary activities