Stanislas Leibler
The Rockefeller University
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Primary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2016)
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Biosketch
Stanislas Leibler is a physicist whose research focuses on the quantitative description of living matter. In particular, he made contributions towards the quantitative description of cellular assembly, biochemical and synthetic genetic networks and the ecology of microbial populations. Leibler was born in Poland and after four years of undergraduate studies moved to France, where he completed his education and he received a PhD in theoretical physics from University of Paris XI in 1984. Following a postdoctoral appointment at Cornell University, he became a tenured researcher in the Theoretical Physics Department of the Saclay Research Center in France. In 1992 he joined the faculty of Princeton University, where he was a professor in the Departments of Physics and Molecular Biology. In 2001, after one year as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in Princeton, Leibler moved his laboratory to the Rockefeller University. At present he splits his time between Rockefeller and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose faculty he joined in 2009. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
The Laboratory of Living Matter, headed by Stanislas Leibler at the Rockefeller University, is interested in collective phenomena taking place in biological systems. Collective phenomena involving many interacting components can be observed and studied on different levels of organization, ranging from assemblies of molecules to assemblies of cells. Leibler and his collaborators strive to understand quantitatively such phenomena in simple microbial systems. After contributing to the system description of cellular assemblies and biochemical networks as well as to the creation of synthetic genetic networks, they are now focusing their efforts on the investigation of microbial populations. In particular, the laboratory is continuing its quantitative studies of collective survival strategies in bacteria (such as bacterial persistence, sporulation or non-genetic behavioral individuality) and of population dynamics in closed microbial ecosystems. These experimental studies are performed in parallel with related theoretical work done at the Rockefeller University and at the Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study.
