William S. Bialek

William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. He co-directs the Center for the Physics of Biological Function and directs the Program in Biophysics. His research sits on the border between physics and biology. He is best known for work demonstrating that some living systems come very close to the limits of what is allowed by the laws of physics. More generally, he is interested in finding theoretical principles that encompass the complexity and diversity of life. He examines living systems at scales from single molecules to cells to brains to flocks of birds.

He was awarded the 2013 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience, the 2018 Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics by the American Physical Society, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences

Bialek received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. After postdoctoral appointments at Groningen and University of California, Santa Barbara, he joined the Berkeley faculty before moving to the NEC Research Institute. He has been on Princeton's faculty since 2001.