Welcome to TGLab
The Laboratory for the Physics of Life at Princeton University will study the basic physical principles that govern the existence of multicellular life, from the collective behavior of soil-dwelling amoeba to the development of the human embryo after the moment of conception.
Situated at the intersection of biological physics and systems biology, a core focus of this lab will be to understand embryonic development (in Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, and in mice) from the perspective of a physicist. As a physicist, I view development–the complex process through which an organism grows from a single cell into a differentiated, multicellular organism–as a self-assembly problem. As such, we should be able to formulate and experimentally validate quantitative models that describe how individual cells interact and organize in order to generate complex life forms.
A similar self-assembly problem exists in the collective behavior of amoebae populations. Facing starvation, originally autonomous, single-celled amoebae will band together, forming a multi-cellular organism that produces spores. Amoebae offer a highly accessible experimental system which, in combination with a quantitative physical approach, promises to improve our understanding of cell signaling, early stages of cell differentiation and pattern formation, and the emergence of the collective behavior that leads to multicellularity.
Our research will be mainly experimental, but with a strong theoretical influence. On the experimental side, we’ll study life in real time, measuring and manipulating model organisms in vivo. We are building state-of-the-art microscopes and microfluidics devices, and make heavy use of tools from molecular biology and genetics. On the theoretical side, we design analytical and numerical models to test and guide our experiments.
In February 2009, I join Princeton as an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department and an associate of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Molecular Biology Department. I will teach classes in both the Physics Department and at the Lewis-Sigler Institute. My research is highly interdisciplinary, and my hope is to work closely with students from many departments across campus, including physics, biology, computer science, engineering and applied mathematics.