A Physics Perspective of Life

Daniel Lüsebrink, Physics and Astronomy
Coach House, Green College, UBC
Monday, January 16, 8-9 pm

How far has biology evolved towards becoming a quantitative science? In physics, properties are ultimately always quantified by a number in order to be accepted as a physical reality. Numbers present themselves as a natural form for describing observable phenomena and, more importantly, for understanding them. In biology there are different levels of description, hence we need to consider how well concepts from physics are suited to helping us understand living systems.

Daniel Lüsebrink received his Physics diploma (i.e. masters) in 2006 after studies of Physics at RWTH Aachen university in Germany and his PhD Theoretical Physics in 2011 at the university of Cologne in Germany, where he worked in Softmatter Physics on “Mesoscopic simulations of colloidal diffusion in temperature gradients.”

After working for 8 months as a software developer in building engineering, he returned to research in Softmatter Physics as a Postdoc at the Institute of Complex Systems and Interdisciplinary Physics in Palma de Mallorca in Spain and worked for 1 year on “magnetic filaments in microchannel flow”. Following a 3 months stay as a guest scientist at Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany he came to Vancouver to work for 1.5 years as a Postdoc at the department of Physics and Astronomy of the UBC on “computational and theoretical protein research in neurodegenerative diseases.”