Physics Frontier Center for Living Systems

Living systems continually explore new out-of-equilibrium configurations and adapt to changing environments from their special perch in phase space. This open-ended adaptive ability has enabled living matter to emerge from a primordial stew of chemical species and develop pathways for self-replication and diversification of physiological function in response to ever-changing environmental conditions.

A significant gap in our understanding of living matter lies in our limited knowledge of how living systems adapt, learn, and evolve new functions. This Physics Frontiers Center (PFC) award aims to address this gap by establishing a Center for Living Systems (CLS) at the University of Chicago. The primary objective of the CLS is to develop general frameworks for adaptation in complex systems.

Through the PFC award, the CLS will focus on creating frameworks to understand adaptation in living systems that span length and time scales. This endeavor necessitates progress in the new field of science dedicated to understanding information processing and memory storage in far-from-equilibrium systems. To achieve its goals, the CLS will facilitate collaboration and interdisciplinary research among diverse scientific communities through various Center-led activities, including workshops, seed funding, external collaborations, and the establishment of Shared Facilities.

The CLS will contribute to the advancement of Physics education by implementing a multi-faceted approach aimed at accelerating culture change within Physics education to train the future Physics workforce and promote diversity within the field. The CLS will develop recruitment and science outreach programs to involve under-represented groups and foster effective training culture in Physics communities.

The CLS research activities are organized into three areas. The first focuses on understanding how evolutionary processes that play out on the billions-of-years timescale build components that can adapt on much shorter time scales. The second research area will explore the nature of the mechanochemical dynamical systems that control the shape and motion of cells and multicellular tissue.

The third research area seeks to unite the mechanistic and physical insights into adaptation gleaned from the first two research areas to reveal how computation is done in complex systems. This distills out the primary vision of the center: to learn how strongly interacting, heterogeneous biological systems perform computations that make them adaptable to complex inputs over a wide range of time and spatial scales.

A seed funding mechanism will be used to explore how ideas gleaned from living systems can advance research in non-living systems, including non-equilibrium matter, open quantum systems and photonics.

This Physics Frontiers Centers award is co-funded by the Division of Physics within the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems within the Directorate for Biological Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.