Phil Nelson
University of Pennsylvania
The Biophysicist Editor

What are you currently working on that excites you?

I recently updated and reissued my textbook Biological Physics (Student Edition, 2020) and was happy to find that I could distribute it at a small fraction of its previous price, making it very broadly accessible. I’m now working on a similar project, reissuing another textbook called Physical Models of Living Systems (Second Edition, 2021). I’m particularly excited for the opportunity to add several new chapters, on topics and scales ranging from the molecular (catch-bonding), to instrumentation (mathematics of cryo-EM), to systems (competence transition in Bacillus subtilis), to global (stochastic modeling of the effects of superspreaders in a pandemic). Students in my own class have responded enthusiastically to these topics, so I’m glad for a chance to make the discussion more widely available.

What have you read lately that you found really interesting or stimulating?

Neil Shubin’s Some Assembly Required (Pantheon, 2020) is a masterful page-turner filled with fascinating stories that were new to me. Raghu Parthasarathy’s forthcoming So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape our Living World (Princeton, 2022), which I read in manuscript, is brilliantly clear and beautifully illustrated. Leopold Infeld’s Quest: An Autobiography (Chelsea Publishing, 1980) is deeply moving and unlike any other scientific memoir.