Spotlight on new faculty: Ido Golding, Biological Physics

The Department of Physics at Illinois welcomes an extraordinary set of ten new faculty members this year. Eight of them have arrived on campus and have begun setting up their labs and settling into life in Champaign-Urbana. Two more faculty are set to arrive in January. We will feature each of them here over the next couple of weeks. Check back regularly to learn more about the exciting work these new faculty members are doing.

Professor Ido Golding

As a biological physicist, Ido Golding studies the function of living cells. He is best known for the experimental quantification of key biological processes, such as gene expression and viral infection, inside individual bacterial cells. In his research at Illinois, he seeks to uncover the process by which cells with the same DNA differentiate to become distinct from one another. Ido’s work draws on resources from multiple areas of physics—both experimental and theoretical—to answer this central biological question. He says, “Biology traditionally has not had the tools to address the difference between cells.” On the other hand, statistical physics has the tools to look at many different particles that do different things, and “yet they come together to make one entity, like a liquid, or a superconductor, or a magnet, or a star.” Ido’s work capitalizes on these insights from physics to understand this key biological phenomenon, that is, “many, many simple entities becoming one more complex entity.” 

To learn more about Ido's research, or to inquire about working in his lab, please visit his website.