Prof. Ariel Amir

The group develops physical theory for living systems, asking how the noisy, microscopic behavior of cells and molecules gives rise to robust, quantitative regularities at the level of the whole organism. A central theme is cell growth and size control: why bacteria and other cells maintain remarkably tight distributions of size, shape, and cycle timing despite stochastic gene expression and noisy division. By treating these as problems in statistical physics, the work seeks coarse-grained laws and mechanisms that hold across organisms rather than system-specific descriptions.

More broadly, the group studies how disorder, fluctuations, and feedback shape biological structure and dynamics, from the mechanics and morphogenesis of cell walls to the statistics of mutation accumulation, aging, and population growth. The same toolkit reaches into condensed-matter and disordered systems, where questions about glassy relaxation, localization, and random matrices connect to the broader physics of complex systems. The aim is explanatory theory: minimal models, tested against quantitative single-cell and population data, that reveal the principles underlying biological order.