Molecular Biophysics at Wesleyan University

Molecular Biophysics is situated at the intersection of molecular biology, chemistry, and physics, and defines an interdisciplinary vantage point from which to develop a fundamental description of biological systems that spurs new and important advances in life science and biotechnology.

At Wesleyan, graduate and undergraduate students work together in small faculty led groups that pursue challenging research problems in protein structure and folding, molecular models of enzyme mechanisms, DNA structure and dynamics, nucleic acid-protein interactions, molecular recognition, the nature of gene expression and regulation, membrane dynamics and membrane proteins.

To make progress on these challenges, molecular biophysics brings together approaches from physics, chemistry, and mathematics to provide analytical and quantitative descriptions of molecular and macromolecular structure and dynamics.  Accordingly, students learn a range of experimental and theoretical methods, including optical and magnetic resonance spectroscopies, x-ray crystallography, microcalorimetry, transient kinetic techniques, fluorescence imaging, single-molecule microscopy, statistical mechanics, computer simulations, molecular modeling, and information science.