Invited Speakers

Tongye Shen tshen@ucsd.edu UC San Diego

Biophysics theory Biological systems function in noisy environments. To understand how the signaling information is propagated and how large scale structure form in the cells are major challenges of the statistical physics requiring going beyond equilibrium theory. From a physical point of view, these aspects of cell biology can be formulated as questions of the stability of attractor states and the dynamics of transitions among such states in a manybody system. I will show how a common set of techniques (some "partition function" based and others dynamic operator based) can be used to study the statistical attractors of nonequilibrium biological systems. These methods, somewhat analogous to ones from other fields of physics, are illustrated with examples from biomolecule folding and the far-from-equilibrium structure and motion of cells. I will also mention some unique challenges faced here which, if resolved, may yield benefits for work in other fields.