Modern Biophysics

Sep 3, 2025 — Dec 3, 2025

About the course

This graduate course is designed to provide graduate students with key concepts and practical applications in Biophysics, with an emphasis on the quantitative tools as they are used in current research. Biophysics is a highly interdisciplinary field—the researchers who attend the annual Biophysical Society meeting, for example, come from departments spanning all of the STEM disciplines. Nevertheless, they share a common interest to establish a quantitative understanding of living matter. Despite growing interest however, a gap remains in graduate training to prepare students to contribute effectively to this broad and rapidly evolving field. This course aims to address this gap by covering both foundational and advanced concepts and applications that are commonly used by practicing biophysicists today. The structure of the course will follow selected advanced material from Physical Biology of the Cell by Rob Phillips, Jane Kondev, Julie Theriot, and Hernan G. Garcia. Each topic will be introduced conceptually, developed mathematically, and explored through real biological case studies using both textbook material and current literature. Given student interest, the course may include interviews with leading biophysicists on their recent published work. Topics will include:

• Diffusion problems in biology
• Enzymatic reactions including ODEs, diffusion-limited reactions, and Michaelis-Menton reactions
• Statistical mechanics as it applies to Biology, including Gibbs free energy of biochemical reactions
• Liquid-liquid phase separation, and its role in the cell and in transcription
• Polymer physics; DNA looping, persistence length, polymer entropy
• Heterogeneous mixtures and osmotic pressure
• Quantitative analysis of genetic networks
• Expression distributions of transcription and translation
• Phase portrait analysis and stability/metastability of cellular states
• Genetics of enhancers – from a biophysical perspective
• Pattern formation including Turing patterns, symmetry breaking in an embryo
• Quantitative genomics (time permitting)

Registration

This course is available for registration under the Western Dean's Agreement. To register, you must obtain the approval of the course instructor and you must complete the Western Dean's agreement form , using the details below. The completed form should be signed by your home institution department and school of graduate studies, then returned to the host institution of the course.

Other Course Details