William Bialek

Physicist, Princeton University

A theoretical physicist interested in the phenomena of life, William Bialek is best known for work emphasizing the approach of biological systems to the fundamental physical limits on their performance. Educated in the San Francisco public schools, he received his AB (1979) and PhD (1983) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent postdoctoral years at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara; returned to Berkeley as a faculty member in 1986. In late 1990 he moved to the newly formed NEC Research Institute, then joined the Princeton faculty in 2001. A Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), he received the 2013 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience and the 2018 Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics from the American Physical Society. As passionate about teaching as about research, he has received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and served as a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar (2016-17). Most generally, he would like to know if there are theoretical principles that have the power and generality that we have come to expect in physics, yet encompass the complexity and diversity of life’s most beautiful phenomena. This has led to work on a wide range of systems, from the interplay of quantum and classical dynamics in enzymes to coding and computation in the brain, and from genetic networks in development to collective behavior in flock of birds.