Martin Falk - Non-equilibrium design principles for adaptive molecular matter

Abstract: Life is a strikingly improbable form of molecular matter, distinguished not only by its exceptional functional properties, but also by its potential to dynamically exhibit new functions in response to a changing environment - in other words, by its ability to adapt. What physical principles allow for the emergence of these adaptive abilities? In this talk, I will show examples of simple processes that embed adaptive ability into molecular systems across many different contexts; for instance, how time-varying selection landscapes induce rapid material function-switching; how cooperative replicative dynamics result in error correction when information is distributed across many autocatalytic sequences; and, how rate-sensitive plasticity allows for trainable computation in molecular interaction networks.

Biosketch: Dr Falk is a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow at the University of Chicago. Here is his Google Scholar page. He earned his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2019 with a thesis entitled, "Self-assembly of biological heteropolymers," with Leonid Mirny and Michael Brenner. He then had a 2-year postdoc at U. Chicago, working with Arvind Murugan and William Irvine. In 2023, he began the Schmidt AI+Science fellowship at U. Chicago.