Farshid Jafarpour
Farshid Jafarpour has been an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics and a member of the Centre for Complex Systems Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands since 2021. He is broadly interested in non-equilibrium processes in biological systems. He received his Master's degree in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Statistical Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016 working on applications of stochastic processes in physical, chemical, and biological systems, and the origin of life in collaboration with NASA Astrobiology Institute. Farshid held two postdoctoral research positions, first at Purdue University studying the physics of bacterial growth, and a second at the University of Pennsylvania working on statistical physics of soft-matter and biological systems.
Wednesday April 19th
Growth Fluctuations in Bacteria
Genetically identical bacterial cells, even in identical environments, exhibit significant variability in their phenotypic behavior such as their growth rates, division sizes, and generation times. With recent advances in single-cell technologies, we now can measure not only the distributions of these quantities but also the correlations between these variables both within and across generations. These statistical descriptions have paved the way for more accurate models of cellular growth and division. In this talk, I will discuss how the details of these new phenomenological models, such as fluctuations in single-cell growth rates and the mechanism of cell-size control, affect various population-level quantities.