Overview

From different, but complementary perspectives, and taking advantage of advanced specialized methods, the biomedical research disciplines of Physiology and Biophysics seek to discover, analyze and explain the functions of the human body’s building blocks: cells, tissues and organs. The availability of information from genomics, imaging, and proteomics, combined with the power of computational methods, has enabled entirely new approaches for making these discoveries and relating them to the most basic molecular mechanisms. Most importantly, these new approaches make it possible to integrate, in the research activities of the Program’s faculty, the findings from genetics, structural biology, and cell and molecular biology with principles and representations from physics and engineering. Together, they create a systems-level view of function in physiological components (e.g., from the cell to the heart, and from the neuron to the nervous system). This new integrative perspective, termed Integrative Systems Biology, complements and completes the study of structure and mechanisms of the body’s building blocks from their embryonic development to their mature function, in both healthy and diseased states. The Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology (PBSB) graduate program is designed to engage students in education through research in current and innovative aspects of these three synergistic components of modern biomedicine.

News

May, 2021:
Jordana K. Thibado, Ph.D., a PBSB graduate student in the labs of Dr. Joshua Levitz, was chosen as the 2021 Distinguished Student Commencement Speaker.

April, 2021:
Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology (PBSB) graduate students won poster awards at the 40th Annual Vincent du Vigneaud Memorial Research Symposium:

Poster Presentation Award – First Year, 1st Place: Thasin Peyear, “The Time Course of Amphiphile Translocation Across Lipid Bilayers.” (Professor Olaf Andersen’s Lab)

Second Year+ Poster, 2nd Place: Robert Myers, “A single-cell multiomic investigation of JAK2 V617F mutant myeloproliferative neoplasms.” (Associate Professor Dan-Avi Landau Lab)

Oral Presentation Award – 1st Place: Bobbie Pelham-Webb, “The Molecular Resetting of Pluripotent Stem Cell Identity during Mitotic Exit.” (Asst. Professor Effie Apostolou Lab)

3rd Place: Tomer Yaron, ”Phosphorylation of SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid Protein Selectively Regulates Viral and Host RNA-Protein Binding and is Essential for Viral Infection.” (Professor Olivier Elemento and Professor Lewis Cantley Labs)

May, 2020:
Pradeep Ambrose, Ph.D., a PBSB graduate student in the labs of Dr. Charles Rice and Dr. Christopher Mason, was chosen as the 2020 Distinguished Student Commencement Speaker.

November, 2019:
November 8, 2019 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

ORAL PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Mojdeh Shakiba, M.S. (Schietinger Lab)
  ORAL PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE (SHARED):
Hanan Baker, M.S. (Andersen and  Heller Labs)
Michael Crowley, M.Sc. (Mittal Lab)
Nicole Lustgarten Guahmich, B.S. (Blobel Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Navid Paknejad, BEng (Hite Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE:
Dylan Murphy, B.S. (Apostolou Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, THIRD PLACE (SHARED):
Shana Bergman, B.S. (Weinstein Lab)
Ambrose Plante, B.S. (Weinstein Lab)

November, 2018:
Jamal Elkhader, a Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Computational Biology graduate student in the lab of Dr. Olivier Elemento, won both 1st place and tied for the People's Choice Award at the annual Weill Cornell Graduate School and Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School Three Minute Thesis® Competition for his presentation on "An Integrative Approach to Drug Repositioning."

November 16, 2018 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

ORAL PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Gabriel Fitzgerald, B.S. (Blanchard Lab)
  ORAL PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE:
Bobbie Pelham-Webb, A.B. (Apostolou Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Emily Rundlet, B.A. (Blanchard Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE:
Nebojsa Jukic, M.S. (Scheuring Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, THIRD PLACE:
Nicole Lustgarten Guahmich, B.S. (Blobel Lab)

November, 2017:
R. Lea Sanford, a PBSB graduate student in the lab of Olaf S. Andersen, M.D., won 2nd place at the annual Weill Cornell Graduate School and Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School Three Minute Thesis® Competition, for her presentation on “Membranes Matter: Predicting Drug Toxicity."

October, 2017:
October 6, 2017 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

ORAL PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE (SHARED):
Thomas Galassi, B.S. (Heller Lab)
Asaf Poran, B.Sc. (Elemento Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Ambrose Plante, B.S. (Weinstein Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE (SHARED):
Gabriel Fitzgerald, B.S. (Blanchard Lab)
Justin Morse, B.A. (Blanchard Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, THIRD PLACE (SHARED):
Lea Sanford, B.S. (Andersen Lab)
Grigory Tagiltsev, M.S. (Scheuring Lab)

May, 2017:
Gabriel Fitzgerald, a PBSB graduate student, was awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual NRSA from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to continue work on his thesis project in the lab of Dr. Scott Blanchard.

Asaf Poran, a PBSB graduate student working in the laboratory of Olivier Elemento, Ph.D., was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Weill Cornell Medicine Graduate Student Fellowship, “Markey Graduate School of Medical Science Fellowship”.

March, 2017:
Mojdeh Shakiba, a PBSB graduate student was awarded a competitive 2-year fellowship Award from the Department of Defense in the Cancer Horizon program to continue work on her thesis project in the lab of Dr. Andrea Schietinger

Jordana Thibado, a first-year PBSB graduate student, was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She will conduct her thesis research in Dr. Joshua Levitz’s lab.

Professor Randi Silver is a senior author of an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, on “Comparative systems pharmacology of HIF stabilization in the prevention of retinopathy of prematurity”, which was selected by the Editorial Board for recognition as one of the recently published PNAS papers of outstanding scientific excellence and originality. The recognition will be presented at the PNAS Editorial Board Meeting on Sunday, April 30, 2017.

January, 2017:
Greg Farber, a PBSB graduate student was awarded a 2 year American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship to continue his graduate work in the lab of Dr. Carl Blobel.

November, 2016:
Mojdeh Shakiba, a PBSB graduate student in the lab of Dr. Andrea Schietinger, won both 1st place and People's Choice Award at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (WCGS) second-annual Three Minute Thesis® Competition for her presentation on "Antigen Affinity and T cell Dysfunction in Tumors".

October, 2016:
October 21, 2016 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

ORAL PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Jose Alejo, M.Sc. (Blanchard Lab)
  ORAL PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE:
David Kuo, B.S. (Rätsch Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE (SHARED):
Lauren Fairchild, B.S. (Leslie Lab)
Gabriel Fitzgerald, B.S. (Blanchard Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, SECOND PLACE (SHARED):
Michael Crowley, M.Sc. (Mittal Lab)
Cindy Liang, B.S. (Dittman Lab)
Andrew Schaumberg, B.S. (Fuchs Lab)

June, 2016:
Thomas Galassi, a PBSB graduate student in the lab of Daniel A. Heller, PhD, received the "Best Poster Presentation" award at the CUNY Bio|Nano|Med Symposium which was held on June 23rd and 24th 2016.

Cindy Liang, a PBSB graduate student in Dr. Jeremy Dittman’s Lab, was awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship to continue her graduate work in “Characterizing the role of Extended Synaptotagmin-2 at contact sites between the ER and plasma membrane.”

May, 2016:
STAT News interviews Chris Mason about his analysis of twin astronaut genomes. Watch the “Science Happens!” episode: What happened to astronaut Scott Kelly’s DNA during his year in space

Michael LeVine, a PBSB graduate student in Dr. Harel Weinstein's lab, received the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (WCGS) Student Service Award. Michael, along with two other graduate students, received the Student Service Award for founding the "Tri-Institutional Outreach Committee." Awards will be presented at the Weill Cornell Graduate School Convocation Ceremony on Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Two Graduate Students working with PBSB faculty were recipients of the 2016-2017 Weill Cornell Medicine Graduate Student Fellowship - The Jacques Cohenca Predoctoral Fellowship: (1) Milka Doktorova, a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Graduate Program in Computational Biology and Medicine, working in the laboratory of Harel Weinstein, D.Sc.; (2) Chad Kurylo, a Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology (PBSB) graduate student working in the lab of Scott Blanchard, Ph.D.

April, 2016:
Two Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology (PBSB) graduate students won poster awards at the 36th Annual Vincent du Vigneaud Memorial Research Symposium:
First Year Poster, 1st Place: Lea Sanford (PI: Olaf S. Andersen, M.D.) - Membranes Matter: Predicting Drug Toxicity
Second Year+ Poster, 2nd Place: Thomas Galassi (PI: Daniel A. Heller, Ph.D.) - Investigating and Monitoring Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease with a Carbon Nanotube Optical Reporter

March, 2016:
Ekta Khurana was invited to join the very distinguished Editorial Board of the journal Current Protocols in Bioinformatics - a leading international publication in the field of Bioinformatics.

March, 2016:
Olga Boudker received the Michael and Kate Bárány Award 2016 from the Biophysical Society. She was "honored for her dynamic research that has led to a deeper understanding of the structural, thermodynamic, and kinetic aspect of secondary active transport and critically contributed to our understanding of the sodium-coupled transport of amino acids and monoamines. The award is intended to recognize an outstanding contribution to biophysics“.

January, 2016:
Neel Madhukar, a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Graduate Program in Computational Biology and Medicine, working in the laboratory of Olivier Elemento, Ph.D. was the recipient of the PhRMA Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellowship in Informatics

Graduate students Kaitlyn Gayvert and Neel Madhukar in the lab of PBSB faculty member Dr. Olivier Elemento chosen as 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30: Healthcare

January, 2016:
Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (WCGS) Recruitment Event: Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - Friday, January 22, 2016

November, 2015:
Milka Doktorova, a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Graduate Program in Computational Biology and Medicine, working in the laboratory of Harel Weinstein, D.Sc. and Gerald Feigenson, Ph.D. won the Outstanding Poster Award for " Investigating the effects of compositional membrane asymmetry in model systems " at the First Annual Cornell Biophysics Symposium

Robert Frawley, a PBSB graduate student in the labs of Drs. Matthew Cunningham and Carl Blobel, won both 1st place and tied for the People's Choice Award at the First Inaugural Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (WCGS) Three Minute Thesis® Competition for his presentation on "A Glimpse at a New Spinal Fusion: Using Transformed Cells to Produce Mineral in a Targeted Fashion and Possibly Spare Patients a Painful Surgery".

October, 2015:

October 23, 2015 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

ORAL PRESENTATION, FIRST PLACE:
Michael LeVine, B.A. (Weinstein Lab)
  ORAL PRESENTATION, SECOND-PLACE SHARED:
Ishani Basu, B.S. (Dittman Lab)
Benjamin Burnett, M.S. (Blanchard Lab)
Mattia Malvezzi, B.S. (Accardi Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, FIRST-PLACE SHARED:
Milka Doktorova, M.S. (Weinstein Lab))
Jin Hyun Ju, B.Eng. (Mezey Lab)
  POSTER PRESENTATION, SECOND-PLACE SHARED:
Jose Alejo, M.Sc. (Blanchard Lab)
Peipei Guo, B.S. (Rafii Lab)

May, 2015:
Michael Crowley received the 2015 Vincent Du Vigneaud First Year Poster Award - 1st Place, at the 35th Annual Vincent duVigneaud Memorial Research Symposium for his poster on "Exploring cross-talk in the arteriole hematopoietic stem cell niche through RNA-sequencing.".

José Gabriel Barcia Durán, a PBSB graduate student in Shahin Rafii's lab, received the 2015 Vincent Du Vigneaud Second- Year and Above Poster Award - 2nd Place, at the 35th Annual Vincent duVigneaud Memorial Research Symposium for his poster on "S1P1 is Required for the Reprogramming of endothelial cells to a Hemogenic State.".

November, 2014:
Kofi Deh, a PBSB graduate student, was awarded a 2 year Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) to support research into the development of quantitative susceptibility mapping techniques in magnetic resonance imaging for quantification of drug delivery in the lab of Dr. Yi Wang.

November 7, 2014 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

BEST ORAL PRESENTATION:
Lauretta Lacko, B.Sc. (Stuhlmann Lab)

  BEST POSTER PRESENTATION (Tie):
Ishani Basu, B.S. (Dittman Lab)
Michael LeVine, B.A. (Weinstein Lab)

October, 2014:
Lauretta Lacko, a PBSB graduate student in Heidi Stuhlmann's lab, received the 2014 Outstanding Poster Award by a Graduate Student at the Developmental Vascular Biology and Genetics Workshop VI / Vascular Inflammation Workshop at Vascular Biology 2014 for her poster entitled, "Role of EGFL7 in endothelial and trophoblast cells during placental developmental and its association with Preeclampsia”.

September, 2014:
Dr. Christopher Mason was profiled in Popular Science as one of The Brilliant Ten of 2014, for his ongoing work in sequencing "the genes of everything from subway microbes to NASA astronauts to learn how the environment affects genetic code".

September, 2014:
Dr. Christopher Mason has been named 2014 Vallee Young investigator by the Vallee Foundation for his work in elucidating the dynamic functional heterogeneity of Acute Myeloid Leukemia hematopoietic stem cells during chemotherapy.

July, 2014:
Mike LeVine, a PBSB graduate student in Harel Weinstein's lab, received a Best Poster Award at the 3DSIG2014 Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics meeting for his poster entitled "NBIT: An N-body information theory framework for understanding collective motions in proteins".

October, 2013:

October 25, 2013 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

BEST ORAL PRESENTATION (Tie):
Sebastian Stolzenberg, PhD (Weinstein Lab)
Michael Wasserman, BS (Blanchard Lab)

  BEST POSTER PRESENTATION:
Pradeep Ambrose, BA (Rice Lab)
Tashalee Brown, BS (Christini Lab)

  POSTER PRESENTATION – Runners-Up:
Sheng Li, BS (Mason Lab)
Mattia Malvezzi, BS (Accardi Lab)

September, 2013:
Dr. Sheila Nirenberg was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on how the brain encodes visual information.

August, 2013:
Christopher E. Mason, Assistant Professor in Physiology and Biophysics, received an Excellence in Partnering award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry for "exemplary contributions to a framework for quality laboratory integration of genome sequencing technologies into healthcare delivery."

July, 2013:
We join Weill Cornell's Dean Laurie Glimcher and Cornell University's President David J. Skorton in congratulating Dr. Scott Blanchard for his election to tenure in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, in recognition of his ongoing work in single molecule biophysics.

April, 2013:
Christopher E. Mason, Assistant Professor in PBSB Program, was featured in Reuters, Nature, Newsday, CBC news, Huffington Post, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and other media outlets for his recent paper on gene patents published in Genome Medicine and also for his work as a scientific expert on gene patents for the AMP v. Myriad Genetics case before the US Supreme Court.

April, 2013:
Sheng Li, a PBSB graduate student in Dr. Christopher E. Mason's lab, won a National Science Foundation Travel Fellowship and was invited to give a speech at the 17th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2013) held at the Tsinghua University for her paper on "An optimized algorithm for detecting and annotating regional differential methylation".

March, 2013:

March 15, 2013 PBSB Retreat
Oral and Poster Presentation Award Winners

BEST ORAL PRESENTATION (Tie):
Fang-Ke Huang, PhD (Huang Lab)
Steve Lianoglou, PhD (Leslie Lab)

  BEST POSTER PRESENTATION:
Mattia Malvezzi (Accardi Lab)

  POSTER PRESENTATION – Runners-Up:
Benjamin Burnett (Blanchard Lab)
Danielle Flood (K. Hajjar Lab)
Lauretta Lacko (Stuhlmann Lab)
Zachary Nichols (Nirenberg / Victor Lab)

Two Graduate Students working with PBSB faculty were awarded competitive graduate research fellowships: (1) Lenore Pipes, a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Graduate Program in Computational Biology and Medicine, working in the laboratories of Dr. Christopher E. Mason and Dr. Adam Siepel, won a 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship for her work on de novo transcriptome assembly and genome assembly. Her fellowship will last from 2013-2016. (2) Michael LeVine, a PBSB graduate student working in the lab of Dr. Harel Weinstein was awarded a National Research Service Award (NRSA - F31) to work on "Ligand-Specific Allosteric Modulation by Drugs of Abuse" for the next 4 years, starting June 1, 2013.

January, 2013:
Dr. Olivier Elemento was awarded a five-year Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award.

October 2012:
PBSB graduate student Jonathan Bourne from Dr. Peter Torzilli's laboratory won the Young Investigator Award at the First Annual Musculoskeletal Repair and Regeneration Symposium held at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

September 2012:
The Campagne laboratory was awarded the best poster award for "Compression of high-throughput sequencing data" at the Wellcome Trust's Genome Informatics 2012 meeting in Cambridge, UK.

May 2012:
Dr. Christopher Mason was featured in a two part profile by the New York Genome Center for his work on non-human primate genomics, gene patenting policy, and other activities.

May 2012:
Asif Rizwan, a PBSB graduate student in Jason Koutcher's lab, received the "Magna Cum Laude Merit Award" at the 20th Annual International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) conference for his poster on "Assessment of lactate in LDH-A silenced 4T1 tumors with selective multiple-quantum coherence transfer."

April 2012:
Benjamin Burnett, a PBSB graduate student in Scott C. Blanchard's lab, received the 2012 Vincent du Vigneaud Award of Excellence (Second Year Award) at the annual Symposium for his poster on "Kinetic Properties of Elongation Factor-Tu, GTP, and Aminoacyl-tRNA Ternary Complex from Escherichia coli."

Feb 2012:
Sayan Mondal, a student in Harel Weinstein's lab, won the Student Research Achievement Award at the Biophysical Society's 2012 Annual Meeting for his poster on the interaction of GPCRs with the membrane.

Oct 2011:
Sheila Nirenberg presented a talk, "Can we speak the language of the brain?", at the TEDMED 2011 conference. A Q & A session followed.

Apr 2011:
Randi Silver received a 2010 Individual Biomedical Research Award from the Hartwell Foundation for her research on "Mast Cells in Chronic Lung Disease in Premature Birth Infants".

Mar 2011:
Olaf Andersen received the Biophysical Society's Distinguished Service Award for his distinguished service to the membrane biophysics and physiology communities and to the field of biophysics through his work at the Journal of General Physiology.

Feb 2010:
At the 2010 National Biophysical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Dr. Crina Nimigean was awarded the prestigious Dayhoff award for her work on ion channel biophysics, and Helgi Ingolfson (in Dr. Olaf Andersen's lab) was awarded Best Poster in the Membrane Biophysics category in the Graduate Students competition.

Jun 2009:
PBSB graduate student Jonathan Bourne from Dr. Peter Torzilli's laboratory won 2nd Place in the Ph.D. student poster presentation competition (Tissue and Cellular Biomechanics and Imaging Category) at the 2009 Summer Bioengineering Conference held at Lake Tahoe on June 17-21, 2009. His presentation was titled Collagen Molecular Conformation Exhibits Strain-Rate Dependent Response to Axial Deformation In Silico, and involved modeling the force-induced deformation of a collagen molecule using steered molecular dynamic simulations.

Mar 2009:
PBSB graduate student Ameer Thompson from Dr. Crina Nimigean's Laboratory participated in and won the Student Research Achievement Award (SRAA) at the Biophysical Society's 53rd annual meeting held in Boston this year.

Sep 2008:
PBSB graduate student Ameer Thompson's paper 'Molecular mechanism of pH sensing in KcsA potassium channels' from Dr. Nimigean's laboratory, was published in PNAS [PubMed]

Aug 2008:
PBSB graduate student Ronit V. Oren's paper 'Acquired and Inherited Abnormalities in the Sinoatrial Node' has been selected as the best paper in the session 'Computational Pathophysiology of Cardiac Cells' at the 12th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI 2008), held in Orlando, FL this year.

Jul 2008:
PBSB graduate student Daniel Han's paper describing work done on his thesis project has been selected as an Accelerated Publication and Hot Article in the July 2008 issue of the journal Biochemistry. [PubMed]

Mar 2008:
We are proud to announce that Armen Kherlopian, a current graduate student in the Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology graduate program, was awarded the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.

Feb 2007:
In a national ranking of graduate programs, carried out by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Weill Cornell's PBSB program was ranked #3 in Physiology and #10 in Biophysics. [Article]