About & Syllabus
Physical Biology of the Cell
Summary
It is a wonderful time to be thinking about the workings of the living world. Historic advances ranging from the use of satellites and drones to track animals to the use of biophysical techniques such as optical traps to measure the forces applied by molecular motors have provided an unprecedented window on the living. The aim of this course is to take a broad view of the use of quantitative thinking to query the nature of the living with emphasis on a panoply of problems such as the herding of wildebeest, how to think about transcriptomes and how living organisms perform tasks that seem to contradict the increase of entropy. We will study these problems using whatever tools we need in order to make quantitative and predictive statements about life. The main intellectual thread of the course will be the idea that the type of quantitative data which is becoming routine in biology calls for a corresponding quantitative modeling framework. The plan of this course is to elucidate general principles with exciting case studies and to include abundant opportunities to turn our models into computer code using Python that will help us develop our intuition.
Syllabus
| Day | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 10/05/2026 | A feeling for the organism. What sets the scale of X? The cell as a bag of X. Order of magnitude thinking, scaling estimates and dimensionless numbers as tools for understanding biology. |
| Tuesday | 10/06/2026 | Stuff of t and biology’s unique laws of dynamics. Different update rules in biology, the dynamics of mRNA and the ubiquitous dynamics of turnover. Probability distributions and their appearance in biological phenomena. Chemical master equations as a theory of the histogram. |
| Wednesday | 10/07/2026 | Making our guesses precise: null hypotheses and the great probability distributions. Diffusion as our dynamical null hypothesis. Exploratory processes and when diffusion is not enough. |
| Thursday | 10/08/2026 | The Secret of Life: Defiance. Defying the call to equilibrium and examples of biological defiance. Thinking about ATP consumption and its biological consequences. |
| Friday | 10/09/2026 | Vectors and representations. Rethinking the idea of a vector, from Descartes (x,y) to ChatGPT. Different concepts of regression and fitting, the eigenworm, and describing biological phenomena with minimal variables. Overview of physical biology, what has been achieved, what next? |
When and Where
Our first meeting will take place on Monday, October 5th, 2026: please arrive promptly at 9am. On the first day, Monday, we will be gathering at 8h30.
Each day will have a schedule roughly of the form:
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 9h00 - 12h30 | Lectures from Rob and Jane |
| 12h30 - 13h30 | Lunch Break |
| 13h30 - 17h00 | Lectures from Rob and Jane |
| 17h15 - 18h30 | Computation sessions with Sara |