More Perfect Than We Imagined: A Physicist's View of Life

William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics, and a member of the multidisciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute, at Princeton University. He also serves as Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. An alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley, and a former KITP postdoctoral fellow, he was on the faculty at Berkeley and a member of the NEC Research Institute before moving to Princeton in 2001. Bialek's research interests include a wide variety of theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology, from the dynamics of individual biological molecules to learning and cognition. Best known for contributions to our understanding of coding and computation in the brain, Bialek and collaborators have shown that aspects of brain function can be described as essentially optimal strategies for adapting to the complex dynamics of the world, making the most of the available signals in the face of fundamental physical constraints and limitations. More recently he has followed these ideas of optimization into the early events of embryonic development, and the processes by which all cells make decisions about when to read out the information stored in their genes. His hope is that these diverse biological phenomena may be understandable through some unifying theoretical principles, in the physics tradition