Welcome to the Laufer Center
The Louis & Beatrice Laufer Center, located on the campus of Stony Brook University in NY, is a center for research in Physical & Quantitative Biology. We aim to advance biology and medicine through discoveries in physics, mathematics, and computational science. Past advances at the interface between the physical and life sciences include electron microscopes,
x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, single-molecule force microscopies, CAT scan technology, computer-based drug discovery methods, genomic sequencing, and others. In the future, physics and math promise to help explain the structures and properties of biochemical networks in cells, to model the noisy dynamical processes by which cancer cells or "superbugs" overwhelm their niches and resist modern medicines, to comprehend the physical forces that drive proteins to aggregate in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and to seek physical principles in biology, including how complex biological functionalities arose through evolution from simpler ones. Advances in biology and medicine are increasingly dependent upon statistical physics, dynamics, network and systems science, and computational and mathematical modeling.
The Laufer Center began operations in October, 2010, based on a generous gift from the Laufer family in 2008 with support from Stony Brook University. Laufer Center researchers are drawn from a broad community including Stony Brook Departments of Chemistry, Physics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Computer Science, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and from Brookhaven National Labs. Center goals include advancing the University’s interdisciplinary and translational research in the 21st century, performing innovative research, developing new graduate training programs, hosting seminars and programs by internationally renowned scientists, and catalyzing collaborations among Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Upcoming Events
Yuhai Tu
Date: March 20, 2012
Title: Systems biology of a simple organism: On E. coli’s memory, computation, and energy cost
Willy Wriggers
Date: April 24, 2012
Title: Emergent Complexity of Multiscale Computational Modeling
Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology • Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5252 • Phone: 631.632.4132 • Fax: 631.632.4125
