Research Overview:
My current research efforts focus on a number of topics in biological physics. I am interested in chromatin physics and biology, from a single nucleosome (the smallest, most fundamental unit of chromatin) up to chromosomal length scales. Another major area of interest in my group is evolutionary theory and population genetics, with the emphasis on evolution of proteins and protein complexes and co-evolution of DNA-binding factors and their cognate sites. I am also fascinated by the physics of protein-DNA recognition: how does a transcription factor find its sites robustly and specifically genome-wide? Finally, since many processes in biology occur out-of-equilibrium, I am interested in the general theory of non-equilibrium processes, and especially in non-equilibrium dynamics and global optimization on networks, fitness landscapes, and protein folding landscapes. In the past, I have also contributed to developing methods and algorithms for predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, predicting kinetics of protein folding, analyzing mechanisms of molecular recognition, and predicting binding affinities and specificities of protein-protein interactions.
