Abstract
Living systems grow, divide and regulate their size across an enormous range of scales, yet a few statistical principles recur from single bacteria to whole tissues. This talk looks at growth as a stochastic process: how randomness at the level of individual cells averages into the reproducible behaviour of populations.
Drawing on the physics of living systems and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, we ask which features of a system are universal, which depend on the details, and what the fluctuations themselves reveal about the underlying biology.
Illustrative abstract for a sample colloquium (Amir group themes); real abstracts supplied per event.