Overview of Research Activities
From different, but complementary perspectives, and taking advantage of advanced specialized methods, the biomedical research disciplines of Physiology and Biophysics seek to discover, analyze and explain the functions of the human body's building blocks: cells, tissues and organs. The availability of information from genomics, imaging, and proteomics, combined with the power of
computational methods, has enabled entirely new approaches for making these discoveries and relating them to the most basic molecular mechanisms. Most importantly, these new approaches make it possible to integrate, in the research activities of the Program's faculty, the findings from genetics, structural biology, and cell and molecular biology with principles and representations from physics and engineering. Together, they create a systems-level view of function in physiological components (e.g., from the cell to the heart, and from the neuron to the nervous system). This new integrative perspective, termed Integrative Systems Biology, complements and completes the study of structure and mechanisms of the body's building blocks from their embryonic development to their mature function, in both healthy and diseased states.
The Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology (PBSB) graduate program is designed to engage students in education through
research in current and innovative aspects of these three synergistic components of modern biomedicine.
