Pankaj Mehta

Associate Professor of Physics 

Boston University

Office: SCI 323

Phone: 617-358-6303

Boston University 

Department of Physics

590 Commonwealth Avenue,

Boston, MA 02139

Email: pankajm AT bu.edu

Cirriculum vitae

Research Interests:

I am interested in theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology (and more and more these days Machine Learning).  I want to understand how large-scale, collective behaviors observed in biological systems emerge from the interaction of many individual molecular elements, and how these interactions allow cells to perform complex computations in response to environmental cues. I also have a deep interest in unsupervised learning methods in Machine Learning.

I am a theoretical physicists but the group's research in quite inter-disciplinary . I am part of the BU Microbiome Initiative, BU Bioinformatics Program, the BUMC Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) ,the BU Biological Design Center, and the Hariri's Institute for Computing AIR initiative. To find out more about my research please look at my publications with links to pdf files. Beyond science, I have a running interest in radical politics, sociology, and political economy (much of which I have learned from some wonderful teachers). Some of my writings can be found here.

Code generated by the group can be found here.

Machine Learning Review

Our new Machine Learning review is finally done! Check it out and the 20 Python Notebooks here.

These movies are fun, especially this overview movie.

Group Members:

Bobby Marsland (Biophysics Theory Group Postdoc), Wenping Cui (Graduate), Alexandre Day (Graduate), Ching-Hao Wang (Graduate),

Honorary Group Members:

Marin Bukov, Joshua Goldford

Alumni:

Postdocs: Charles Fisher (Founder/CEO of machine learning start-up unlearn.AI, San Francisco, CA)
Graduate Students: Javad Noorbakhsh (Postdoctoral Fellow, Jackson Laboratory in CT), Alex Lang (Deep Learning Scientist, Nutonomy)
Undergrads: Joseph Sarmiego-Evans (Graduate school at Colorado Physics), Steven (Wooseok) Ahn, Benjamin Dickens (Berkeley Physics)

Other Friends/Regular Collaborators of the group:

Ariel Amir, BU CReM, Balazsi Lab, Caleb Bashor, Claudio Chamon, Joshua Goldford, Kirill Korolev ,Anatoli Polkovnikov, Ed Reznik, Sanchez Lab, David Schwab, Segrè Lab, Anirvan Sengupta, Allyson Sgro

Current projects:

Thermodynamics and statistical inference by cells 

Collective behavior in Dictyostelium 

Synthetic Biology 

Cellular reprogramming and cell fate 

Quantitative microbial ecology 

Statistical mechanics, machine learning, and large biological data sets

Physics problems inspired by biological systems

Nonequilibrium statistical physics

Videos of recent talks:

Statistical physics approaches to community ecology, KITP (Aug, 2017): video

Energy, information, and computation in cells at the ICTS Winter school on quantiative biology (Dec.2015): Part 1,Part 2, Part 3
Adventures at the interface of physics and Biology, KITP (Jan 2015): video
Dictyostelium populations exploit noise to control collective behavior, BIRS Workshop on Stochasticity in Biochemical Reaction Networks, (Sept 2013): video

Publications:

To find out more about my research please look at my publications with links to pdf files.

Funding: