On Saturday, April 25, the second Engineering and Physical Biology (EPB) Symposium will be held at the Fairchild Lecture Hall, 7 Divinity Ave. Speakers from constituent fields – Physics, Engineering, Chemistry and Molecular Biology – will present significant recent findings that range from single molecule studies to investigations of collective cell behavior.
As it was last year, the EPB Symposium day has been organized to bring together students and faculty from three Harvard areas (MCB, Physics and SEAS) with outstanding visiting scholars. EPB is only in its third year as a PhD track for students wishing to “probe living systems through the lens of physics and engineering”.
The day will be divided into two parts. The morning (until 12:30 pm) will be a public symposium featuring four visiting faculty. The public is welcome to attend, and the talks should be of wide interest in the Harvard science community.
The afternoon will feature graduate student presentations in a more intimate setting that should promote the cross-fertilization of disciplines that EPB encapsulates. (These sessions will not be open to the general public.) This part of the Symposium was a great success last year, according to Nancy Kleckner, Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology in MCB, and a key organizer of the Symposium. The active role of students in the preparation of the gathering was an unusual feature, and elicited a high level of involvement and much fine work.
In a short period of time, EPB has grown from a gathering of faculty on a frontier of the biological sciences into a developing community. Some of the exciting possibilities at the physics/engineering/life sciences interface will be showcased at the EPB Symposium.
For more information on the Symposium, contact Donna Lundberg, EPB Program Administrator, donna@mcb.harvard.edu
More information on EPB can be found at http://www.physicalbiology.fas.harvard.edu.
