Biophysics Colloquium with Mikhail Tikhonov

Microbes fill the soils, the oceans, our bodies. Communities of microbes collectively carry out functions that are essential for human health, industry, and the global climate, but predicting their properties has proven very challenging due to the tremendous diversity, at all scales of resolution, that such ecosystems harbor. In this talk, Tikhonov aims to showcase the richness of conceptual and practical challenges in microbial ecology and discuss recent progress in applying the ideas of statistical physics to this field. In particular, some ecosystems appear to be “coarse-grainable,” meaning some of their properties can be predicted with simple models ignoring much of the complexity. Tikhonov will describe efforts towards developing ecosystem coarse-grainability as a new branch of physics-inspired ecological theory, and discuss progress towards building new methods for prediction, dissection and design of these complex systems: methods that work because of diversity, and not despite it.