Sharp Lab, Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Perelman School of Medicine

How are biological structures formed and maintained? How do they manifest biological function? These are central questions in biology that date back thousands of years, to the time of Aristotle. We address the same fundamental questions at a molecular level: how is the diverse and beautiful array of protein and nucleic acid structures formed, and how do they carry out their biological function? Our research addresses these questions using the tools and principles of biophysics, including thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, simulations, and computational geometry.