Upcoming Events
FRONTIERS IN SCIENCE SEMINAR: The seminar is on vacation for the summer - check back in the fall!About Frontiers in Science:
The Frontiers in Science (FIS) program is intended to introduce students from all disciplines and academic levels to the beauty and fun of scholarly pursuits in the natural and physical science disciplines, and to engage faculty in interdisciplinary and multi-institutional research activities. The foundation of the FIS program are monthly seminar presentations on leading-edge interdisciplinary research in biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics, and open discussions on opportunities in science as a career, research training internships for students, and faculty research collaborations.
The FIS series is hosted by the UCSD Center for Theoretical Biophysics and the CSUSM Department of Physics.
Past Events
April 24, 2008Amplification, Threshold, and Combinatorial Control: The Device Physics of Bacterial Gene Regulation
Terence Hwa, PhD., Professor, Department of Physics & CTBP, UCSD
Biological organisms possess an enormous repertoire of genetic responses to ever-changing combinations of cellular and environmental signals. Unlike digital electronic circuits however, signal processing in cells is carried out by a limited number of asynchronous devices in fluctuating aqueous environments. In this talk, I will discuss the control of genetic responses in bacteria. Theoretical analysis of the known mechanisms of transcriptional control suggests that the cell's transcriptional system constitutes a rudimentary type of computing machine, belonging to the class of "Boltzmann machine". These machines are expected to be programmable, in the sense that different combinatorial control functions of the same inputs may be specified by specifying a short stretch of DNA sequence (the promoter). Further analysis of post-transcriptional control suggests mechanisms for signal amplification, threshold response, and noise attenuation. I will present experimental characterization of some of these bio-computational "devices", and illustrate how the promoter sequences may be "trained" by directed evolution experiments. Quantitative characterization and controlled manipulation of these devices may bring about predictive understanding of biological control systems, and reveal interesting, novel strategies of distributed computing.
March 27, 2008
Computations in the Visual Cortex
Minjoon Kouh, PhD., Post-Doctoral Scholar (Prof Tatyana Sharpee's Research Group), CTBP & The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
February 28, 2008
Molecular Machines in RNA and Protein Synthesis
Stefan Klumpp, PhD., Post-Doctoral Scholar (Prof Terry Hwa's Research Group), CTBP & the Department of Physics, UCSD
January 31, 2008
MicroRNAs: Microprocessors that Fine-Tune Tissue Development
Peter McHale, PhD., Post-Doctoral Scholar, Prof Herbie Levine's Research Group - Biological Dynamics of Cellular Systems, CTBP & the Department of Physics, UCSD
November 8, 2007
Which way to go? Modeling Cell Movement
Wouter-Jan Rappel, Ph.D. Senior Scientist, CTBP & the Department of Physics, UCSD
Directed cell movement, or chemotaxis, plays an important role in many key biological processes, including wound healing, fetal development and cancer metastasis. In this talk, I will give an overview of our efforts to use tools from physics to help us understand how cells direct their motion.
Novermber 1, 2007
Celebration for the New Applied Physics Degree
We partied with dry ice punch, liquid nitrogen ice cream, rockets of two types, hovercrafts, and solar viewing.
Pictures are here.
October 18, 2007
Nervous Systems as Seen by Physicists
Henry Abarbanel, Ph.D. Department of Physics & Institute for Nonlinear Science, UCSD
Biological nervous systems are nonlinear collections of neruons with links made of dynamical synapses that collectively perform important functions for animals. Physicists can contribute to their study in an essential quantitative manner. After describing how nervous systems work and how physicists can productively contibute to their study, I will describe one really interesting system: the development and maintenance of birdsong.
September 20, 2007
Dynamics and Energetics of the Large-Scale Conformational Transitions of Proteins Suggest a New View of Allostery
Karunesh Arora, Ph.D., Post-Doctoral Scholar, Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute
September 13, 2007
Grad school in the sciences: What's it like and how do you get there?
A discussion with UCSD science grad students
August 30, 2007
Computer Simulations of Proteins and Nucleic Acids using Implicit Solvent Models
David Case, Ph.D. Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute
April 25, 2007
Using the Physics of Electric Charges to Understand Diseases
Kristin Purdy, Ph.D., Adj. Prof., Department of Physics, CSUSM
April 18, 2007
Connecting Physical Models to Biological Phenomena
Charles L. Brooks, III, Ph.D., Prof., Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute
March 21, 2007
A Critique of Pure Vision
Terrence J. Sejnowski, Ph.D., Prof., Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Sciences
February 21, 2007
Engineering in Biology: designer circuits, re-wired pathways and dN/dt
Matt Scott, Ph.D., Post-Doctoral Fellow (Prof Terry Hwa's Research Group - Statistical Biophysics), UCSD
January 31, 2007
Astrocytes: Eavesdropping on Neuronal Conversations,
Suhita Nadkarni, Ph.D., Post-Dostoral Fellow (Prof Herbie Levine's Research Group - Biological Dynamics of Cellular Systems), UCSD
November 29, 2006
Quantitative Analysis of Genomic Data
Wei Wang, Ph.D., Asst. Prof., Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, UCSD
October 27, 2006
Using Physics to Understand Biology
Jose Onuchic, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Physics & the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, UCSD