Welcome
The Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center is a hub for research in Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University. We advance biology and medicine through discoveries in physical, mathematical, and computational sciences. See our Laufer Center video.
Our research is diverse. Laufer Center researchers insert gene circuits into cells and study non-genetic inheritance and cell fate/decision processes. We develop math and physics for better and faster modeling of biomolecular structure, dynamics, machinery, and interactions. Research areas include drug discovery at molecular and systems pharmacological levels, prediction of the pathogenicity of mutations, elucidation of SARS-CoV-2 infection mechanisms, and vaccine design. We explore how proteins aggregate and how neurosignaling and synaptic neurotransmission are deregulated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. We explore the principles of biomolecular networks and cell adaptation, e.g., how the brain changes with aging and diet.
Laufer Center researchers come from a broad community including Stony Brook departments of chemistry, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, biomedical engineering, biochemistry and cell biology, computer science, microbiology and immunology, ecology and evolution, and pharmacological sciences as well as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.