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
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]
