People
Thomas Gregor
Assistant professor of Physics and member of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
Why am I doing this?
There are three outstanding questions in nature that fuel my curiosity: What is it all made of? Where did it all come from? What is life and what makes us think? Physicists have come a long way at tackling the former two with particle- and astrophysics; however, the latter has traditionally been left to life scientists, and physicists were brought in for new tools and toys, and for quantitative support.
I believe physicists should study life as a question in it’s own right though; as a quantitatively trained scientist who sometimes asks naive questions; as an explorer who discovers “the land of the living”. My only hypothesis is that life has to somehow be reconciled with the laws of physics; and I think it is worth asking what was the “big bang” of life, or what was the “big bang” of consciousness.
But then there is also something else in it for me, in which I do see some “magic” in life, but I don’t trust or believe it, which makes me nervous and makes me want to understand more. I always felt this magic when I had a living organism under my microscope and that organism would just do its spiel for me, over and over, as if driven by a magic hand. I think the true beauty of biology is that we physicists don’t get it, and that there is this “life thing” that we cannot put into our preconceived frameworks. That’s what distinguishes life from the traditional aspects of nature studied by physicists; and I think that’s where we might have a true chance at discovering some new physics through the “eyes” of life.
Research Associates
Srividya Iyer Biswas 
Postdoctoral Research Associate
I am involved in probing and understanding the exquisite processes that govern the emergence of life, especially given the stochastic nature of the key underlying biochemical processes. More generally, questions about how genes transcribe, translate, publish and perish reliably, in the face of such fluctuations, interest me.
Shawn Little 
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Embryonic development of multicellular organisms exhibits a high degree of reproducibility, such that patterning proceeds normally across a range of environmental and genetic conditions. The formation and interpretation of the Bicoid protein gradient in Drosophila embryos provides a rich set of opportunities for exploring the cell biologic processes underlying reproducibility and robustness in embryonic development. I am collaborating with Thomas’ lab in performing quantitative analysis of nuclear and cytoplasmic Bcd distribution in pre-syncytial embryos to determine the reproducibility of early gradients. I am investigating methods to examine the degree to which early Bcd distribution contributes to the highly reproducible nuclear Bcd gradient seen during syncytial stages.
Feng Liu 
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Trained as a physicist with a tremendous interest in biology, I am curious to apply what I’ve learned from physics to quantitatively study biological systems. In the past five years, I have been working with Prof. Martin Gruebele at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain on fast protein folding kinetics by laser induced temperature jump experiments. My research focused on downhill protein folders, which reach the folding “speed limit” as the protein folding barrier becomes comparable with the thermal fluctuation energy. I have designed and identified several engineered proteins to be downhill folders, and I have written a computational model to test the correlation between downhill folding propensity and the stability of the protein. I joined Thomas’ lab to explore complex biological systems at the molecular level.
Graduate Students
Julien Dubuis 
Graduate Student (PhD Candidate), Princeton University
I am a third year graduate student (and a PhD Candidate!) in the Physics Department. I received my first degree from the Ecole Normale Superieure in France, and am currently interested in the problems of information flow in early embryonic development. More specifically, using the Drosophila embryo as a model system, I am estimating the positional information carried by morphogens. When I am not in the lab you can find me at Whitman College where I take part in the undergraduate life as a Resident Graduate Student.
Troy Mestler 
Graduate Student, Princeton University
Troy Mestler graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 2007 with a B.S. in Physics. He joins Thomas’ lab having a rather diverse background, with both theoretical and experimental research experience in non-linear dynamics, nuclear physics, biophysics, and high-energy particle physics. Past work has been on the Neutron Electric Dipole Moment (nEDM) experiment with Dr. Haiyan Gao (Duke), infrared pneumathorax detectors with Dr. Glenn Edwards (Duke), and luminosity measurements on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with Dr. Valerie Halyo (Princeton). He is currently working on cell signaling in Dictyostelium discoideum.
Undergraduate Students
Daniel Acosta-Kane 
Undergraduate student, Princeton University
Daniel is senior undergraduate student at Princeton University. He is building a planar illumination microscope for the imaging of selected planes in Drosophila embryos.
Alexander Morrison 
Undergraduate student, Princeton University
Alex is a sophomore undergraduate student at Princeton University. He is using two-photon microscopy to determine whether the Bicoid morphogen gradient scales with egg length in Drosophila embryos.
Mariela Petkova 
Undergraduate student, Princeton University
Mariela Petkova is sophomore undergraduate student at Princeton University. She works on absolute quantification of bicoid mRNA in single Drosophila embryos.
Martin Scheeler 
Undergraduate student, Princeton University
Martin is a junior undergraduate at Princeton University. He is currently researching the reproducibility and scaling of the Bicoid morphogen gradient between embryos within a single Drosophila species that vary significantly in length.
High School Students
Amogha Tadimety 
High school student, Lawrenceville School
Amogha is senior at Lawrenceville School. In Thomas’ lab, she is working on quantifying environmental effects on the shape of Drosophila embryos. Additionally, she has been tracking the hatching of larvae at these varied environmental cues, in order to make sure that the development of the embryos proceeds normally.