learn more about current research at the Center, see the work to be presented at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society

2021

Game Theory Cancer Models of Cancer Cell-Stromal Cell Dynamics using Interacting Particle Systems Abstract

Bacterial Route-finding and Collective Escape in Mazes and Fractals Abstract

The Broken Symmetry of Low Temperature and High Temperature Unfolding of Proteins in Water Abstract

Emergent in vitro Cancer Tumor Hypoxia and K-Core Collapse Abstract

Field-Drive Robot Swarm Quasi-Transitions Abstract

E. coli Bacteria near "Black Hole" Abstract

Capturing the local entropy production by data compression Abstract

Playing it safe: information constraints bias living systems towards less risky Abstract

A scaling law in CRISPR repertoire sizes arises from the avoidance of autoimmunity Abstract

The size of the immune repertoire of bacteria Abstract

Curious exploration in complex environments Abstract

Competing for Resources: on the Emergence of Property Rights Abstract

Information tradeoffs in receptor arrays Abstract

A simple metabolic architecture allows near-optimal adaptation to rapidly fluctuating environments Abstract

Predictive capacity of a dynamical system Abstract

Trading bits in the readout from a genetic network Abstract

Characterization of the functional relevance of intranuclear transcription factor aggregates in living fly embryos Abstract

Ecological significance of imperfectly synchronized collective behaviors Abstract

Action at a distance in transcriptional regulation Abstract

Light controlled cell-fates in embryonic development Abstract

Live measurements of transcriptional bursting and dynamic gene regulation in early fly embryos Abstract

Decoding locomotion from population neural activity in moving C. elegans Abstract

Automatic Neuron Correspondence Prediction In C.elegans With Deep Learning Abstract

Nonequilibrium Green's functions for functional connectivity in the brain Abstract

Perturbation Theory for the Information Bottleneck Abstract

Gated recurrent neural networks 2: a novel first-order chaotic transition Abstract

Effects of demographic stochasticity on eco-evolutionary dynamics and trait-space patterning of complex communities Abstract

Gated Recurrent Neural Networks 1: marginal stability and line attractors Abstract

Measuring mechanical stress in Myxococcus xanthus monolayers with traction force microscopy Abstract

Viscoelasticity of Myxococcus xanthus Fruiting Bodies Abstract

Early social context alters paired interactions in the bumblebee Bombus impatiens Abstract

Quantifying the pairwise fighting behavior of zebrafish in 3D Abstract

Trail following in bacteria Abstract

Growth and characteristic layering of Myxococcus xanthus active nematic droplets Abstract

Particle size dependence of 3D diffusion in live Escherichia coli cells Abstract

Where and when microtubules are nucleated in the cell Abstract

Behavioral quantification of freely moving mice Abstract

Decoding the physical principles of biomolecular phase separation Abstract

Steering toward the crowd: Orientational interactions induce active phase separation Abstract

Sequence dependence of biomolecular condensates Abstract

Modeling the ecology of parasitic plasmids Abstract

Chromatin Mechanics Dictates Subdiffusion and Coarsening Dynamics of Embedded Condensates Abstract

Biophysical principles of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii CO2-concentrating mechanism Abstract

Active self-organization and division of nematic droplets Abstract

Elastically limited liquid-liquid phase separation Abstract

Chemotactic smoothing of bacterial populations Abstract

Renormalization group analysis of frustrated self-assembly Abstract

Visualizing multiparameter probabilistic models in Minkowski space Abstract

From topological defects to fruiting bodies in bacterial colonies Abstract

Feed-forward correction of neural timing errors through fluctuating scalar input Abstract

Response and flux of information in extended non-equilibrium dynamics Abstract

 Equity and Inclusion in inquiry-based labs Abstract

Human information processing in complex networks Abstract

When it is more powerful to infer than to see Abstract

Free Energy Model of the Human Perception of a Starry Sky Abstract

A coarse-grained view of biochemical feedback and cell-to-cell communication Abstract

Learning the dynamics of cell-cell interactions in confined cell migration Abstract

Diffusiophoresis of passive particles in the presence of protein patterns Abstract

2020

Evolutionary dynamics of cancer on complex stress landscapes Abstract

E. coli Bacteria near "Black Hole" Abstract

The role of heterogeneous environments and docetaxel gradients in the emergence of polyploid, mesenchymal and resistant prostate cancer cells Abstract Abstract

Collective Robot Sex on Dynamic Resource Landscapes Abstract

Continuum modeling of bacterial biofilm development Abstract

Morphogenesis and fractal dimension of bacterial pellicles Abstract

A statistical ensemble approach to understanding adaptive immunity: using sequence data to quantify the extraordinary diversity, in both sequence and protective specifictiy, of the T- and B-cells cells that make up an individual human's immune system Abstract

Searching for emergent long time scales without fine tuning Abstract

Information costs in the control of protein synthesis Abstract

Information tradeoffs in sensing and sampling Abstract

Quantifying success and failure in simple models of large neural populations Abstract

Trading bits in the readout of positional information Abstract

Information-bottleneck renormalization group for self-supervised representation learning Abstract

Compression as a path to simpler models of collective neural activity Abstract

Opto-genetic control of gene regulation in living fly embryos Abstract

Live measurements of transcriptional bursting and dynamic gene regulation in early fly embryos Abstract

Multi-animal pose tracking using deep neural networks Abstract

Predicting the future from the past in visual object motion: optimal representations of mixed stochastic/deterministic trajectories Abstract

How behavioral and evolutionary constraints sculpt early visual processing Abstract

A mechanical model for supervised learning Abstract

Niche-Neutral Transition in a Lotka-Volterra Model of Diverse Ecosystems Abstract

Theory of gating in recurrent neural networks Abstract

Connecting Dynamics and Trainability in Recurrent Neural Networks Abstract

Scalable maximally informative dimensions analysis of deep neural networks Abstract

3D particle diffusion in Escherichia coli cells Abstract

Social context alters behavioral interactions in bumblebees Abstract

One fish, two fish, win fish, lose fish: Imaging and analyzing the fighting behavior of zebrafish in 3D Abstract

Swimmers at low Reynolds number driven by Quincke rotation Abstract

Self-driven phase transitions in living matter Abstract

Topological defects drive layer formation in bacteria colonies Abstract

A hydrodynamic instability drives TPX2 protein droplet formation on microtubules and leads to branching microtubule nucleation Abstract

Growth and dynamics of active nematic droplets of Myxococcus xanthus bacteria Abstract

Sequential and efficient neural-population coding of complex task information Abstract

Investigating the eukaryotic CO2-fixing phase-separated organelle, the pyrenoid Abstract

Cross-feeding is not necessarily evolutionarily stable Abstract

New mechanism of motility-induced phase separation in active colloids Abstract

Phase separation in the nucleus is limited by chromatin mechanics Abstract

Subdiffusive Dynamics of Optogenetic Droplets Report on Local Chromatin Mechanics Abstract

Motif Sequences and Intracellular Phase Separation Abstract

Immune repertoire dynamics out of steady state Abstract

Learning the Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Brownian Movies Abstract

Stochastic Force Inference Abstract

2019

Optimal visual motion estimation in a natural environment  Abstract

Progress on functional connectivity measurement and modeling in C. elegans Abstract

Topological defect driven thickness changes in layers of bacteria Abstract

Reading the mind of the worm: Brain-wide neural dynamics predict behavior in C. elegans Abstract

Mechanical Principles Underlying Development of Bacterial Biofilm Morphology Abstract

Evolutionarily stable coexistence in a single nutrient: optimization and cross-feeding Abstract

Unsupervised Classification of Behavior for Open Field Mouse Recordings Abstract

An Integrated, Quantitative Introduction to the Natural Sciences at Princeton University Abstract

Looping and Clustering: a statistical physics approach to protein-DNA complexes in bacteria Abstract

Statistical mechanics of Twitter Abstract 

A quorum sensing-controlled program of aggregation in V. cholerae Abstract

Verticalization of bacterial biofilms Abstract

Information transmission and evolution of crosstalk in noisy signal transduction networks Abstract

Modeling the influence of metabolic trade-offs on microbiota diversity Abstract

Information flow and the accuracy of concentration measurements in a genetic network Abstract

Motif Sequences and the Statistical Physics of Intracellular Phase Separation Abstract

The role of motility in Myxococcus xanthus droplet formation and droplet geometries Abstract

Mechanical Interplay of Chromatin and Liquid-Liquid Phase Separated Condensates Abstract

Measurement of In vitro Cancer Tumor Hypoxia Abstract

Mechanical principles of biofilm formation revealed by single-cell resolution imaging Abstract

Mining recombination algorithms in modular biosynthetic gene clusters Abstract

Emergence of E. coli Critically Buckled Motile Helices Under Antibiotic Stress Abstract

Understand the role of chemotherapeutic gradient in the emergence of polyploid giant cancer cells using mean field model Abstract

Learning force fields from stochastic trajectories Abstract

Chromatin Mechanics and the Biological Implication Abstract

Active wetting of epithelial tissues Abstract

Neural Correlates of Cognition in Primary Visual versus Downstream Posterior Cortices During Evidence Accumulation Abstract

Exploring the energy landscape of C. elegans neural activities Abstract

RG-inspired analyses of activity in networks of real neurons Abstract

Collective sensing by cell populations with feedback-induced long-range correlations Abstract

A statistical ensemble approach to immune discrimination Abstract

Bacterial Phage Resistance Emergence in Complex Landscapes of Stress Abstract

Extracellular polymers control bacterial biofilm expansion and material properties Abstract

Investigating the role of hemagglutinin protein stability in influenza A evolutionary dynamics Abstract

Precise spatial scaling in the early fly embryo Abstract

Geometric localization of cell wall growth and shape determining proteins in Helicobacter pylori Abstract

Mechanotransduction in bacteria: how Pseudomonas aeruginosa actively probes and responds to substrate mechanics Abstract

E. coli in Mazes. Abstract

Spatiotemporal dynamics of Pma1 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using a reversibly interacting tag-probe system Abstract

The renormalization group and information bottleneck: a unified framework Abstract

Dynamical Implications of Hyperparameters in Reinforcement Learning Abstract

Mean Field Analysis of Batch Normalization Abstract

Nonequilibrium cooperative sensing Abstract

2018

Collective Creativity and Survival Algorithms of Bacteria Abstract 

E. coli Filaments Doing the Twist Abstract

Mapping The Cold Denaturation Landscape of Proteins Abstract

Cancer Dormancy and Criticality from a Game Theory Perspective Abstract

The Emergence of Polyploid Giant Cancer Cells as the Reservoir of Therapeutic Resistance Abstract

Mechanical Principles of Biofilm Formation Abstract

Quorum sensing control of Vibrio cholerae aggregation Abstract

Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics Talk: Precision and emergence in the physics of biological function Abstract

On the learnability of probability distributions Abstract

Searching for collective behavior in a small brain Abstract

Efficient transmission of unique cell identities via correlated fluctuations, emergent discreteness, and error-correcting codes Abstract

Investigating neuronal populations that are truly large – can we keep our models small? Abstract

Exploring a strongly non-Markovian behavior Abstract

On public and private aspects of the adaptive immune system as revealed by statistical inference Abstract

Generation Probabilities of T cell receptors: a story of Coarse Graining Abstract

Self-driven phase transitions in living matter Abstract

Exploring viscoelastic properties of Myxococcus xanthus fruiting bodies with AFM measurements Abstract

3D Motility Measurements of Myxococcus xanthusFruiting Body Formation Abstract

Quantifying Behavior and Interaction in Paired Fruit Flies Abstract

Bacterial Proteins Associated With Cell Shape Homeostasis Localize to Specific 3D Abstract

Inferring the role of internal dynamics in Drosophila aging Abstract

Spatial gradient sensing and wave rectification via excitability Abstract

Optimizing population coding with unimodal tuning curves and short-term memory in continuous attractor networks Abstract 

Subdiffusion Arising from Intracellular Phase Separation Abstract

Spatial Structure in Microbial Competition Models Abstract

Mathematical model of influenza A evolution with HA protein stability Abstract

The Resource Allocation Strategies of E.coli under Different Limitations of Ribosome Abstract

Metabolic Trade-Offs in Serial Dilution Culture Abstract

Verticalization transition in Vibrio cholerae biofilms Abstract

Computer Simulation of a Possible Magic Number Effect in the Phase Transition of the Eukaryotic Photosynthetic Organelle, the Pyrenoid Abstract

How a Well-adapting Immune System Remembers Abstract