Phenotypic Switching

Dr. Herbert Levine is Hasselmman Professor in Bioengineering at Rice University. He is also the co-director of Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontier Center devoted to applying concepts and methods from physical sciences to complex biological and biomedical problems. He is also the coordinator of an international research network of researchers in the Physics of Living Systems, under the auspices of the NSF Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) initiative. Dr. Levine did his undergraduate work at MIT, and received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1979. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and a position on the research staff of the corporate research lab of Schlumberger Inc., he was appointed in 1987 to the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. He rose to the ranks of distinguished professor before leaving in 2012 to accept his new post at Rice. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Mohit Kumar Jolly obtained his B.Tech. and M. Tech. in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur, India, and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Rice University, working at the interface of systems biology and cancer biology. After a short stint as independent postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Cancer Biology, he joined the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, as an Assistant Professor. His work focuses on integrating mechanism-based mathematical models with experiments and clinical data to elucidate the mechanisms of cancer metastasis and therapy resistance. He won the 2016 iBiology Young Scientist Seminar Series - a coveted award for communicating one's research to diverse audience. Dr. Prakash Kulkarni is a Research Professor at the City of Hope National Medical Centre. After receiving his PhD in biochemistry from India, he completed his postdoctoral training in cell biology at New York University School of Medicine. He began his independent academic career as an Assistant Professor of urology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, from where he moved to the protein biophysics laboratory at the Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research at the University of Maryland, prior to taking up is current position. Prior to Johns Hopkins, Dr. Kulkarni held Staff Scientist positions in chemistry and biology at the California Institute of Technology, and in genetics at the Yale University School of Medicine. His main research interests are understanding how conformational dynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) contributes to non-genetic mechanisms underlying disease pathology and heterogeneity in cancer. Dr. Vidyanand Nanjundiah is an Honorary Professor in the Center for Human Genetics, Bengaluru. He earned his BS from the University of Bombay and PhD from the University of Chicago. He held post-doctoral positions at the Hubrecht Laboratorium Utrecht, The Netherlands, Max-Planck-Institut Tubingen, Germany, and Biozentrum, Basel, Switzerland. He began his career as an Assistant Professor and rose to the rank of Professor at the Centre for Theoretical Studies, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He has been a member of the Molecular Biology Unit, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Bombay; Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics and Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. He is an elected member of the Indian National Science Academy.