How does biological function emerge?

Welcome to the SPIN (Statistical Physics, Information & Networks) Lab in the Department of Physics, the Quantitative Biology Institute, and the Wu Tsai Insitute at Yale.

We are interested in understanding how structure and function emerge in complex living systems, particularly the brain. We study how individual neurons interact to form networks; how whole-brain activity orchestrates cognition; and how humans communicate to process information. We approach these problems from a statistical physics perspective: seeking to identify the key minimal ingredients that combine to produce collective macroscopic phenomena. [Read more]