Sarah Kostinski - First passage statistics in biophysics: Theory and applications

Abstract: The time needed for a random walk to reach a boundary, known as the first passage time, arises in many processes in biophysics. For example, how long does it take a molecular motor to transport cargo along a microtubule? When does a nanoparticle diffusing inside the cytoplasm first reach the cell membrane? I will use the last question to show how analyzing intracellular data via first passage statistics overcomes experimental constraints. Then the inspection paradox will be employed to explain how stochastic resetting can reduce the mean first passage time. I will conclude with closed-form solutions we recently found for the cumulative distribution of first passage times in discrete biased random walks.

Biosketch: Dr. Kostinksi is an Assistant Professor of Physics at NYU, leading a research group in theoretical biological and statistical physics, soft matter, and optics. She earned her PhD in Physics at Harvard in 2017 with a thesis entitled "Geometrical aspects of soft matter and optical systems," with Michael Brenner. She then had a 1-year postdoc at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew Univ of Jerusalem, a 3-year postdoc at Tel Aviv Univ, Dept of Physical Chemistry, and then a year at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at UCSB. She joined the NYU faculty in January, 2023. Her Google Scholar page is here.