Title: Quantitative biology: Frontier at the interface of the physical and life sciences

Abstract:

Advances in biology have presented a multitude of opportunities for physicists and for physics. I will illustrate the different type of opportunities using examples encountered during my personal journey as a theoretical physicist: At the molecular scale, a maximum entropy principle turns variations in the sequence composition of related proteins into a procedure to inform the prediction of protein structures and protein-protein interactions. At the cellular level, discovery and application of phenomenological "growth laws" lead to quantitatively accurate predictions on bacterial response to genetic and environmental perturbations.  At the population level, physical expansion of population and tissue open up simple dynamic mechanisms to generate spatiotemporal patterns.