Ofer Kimchi

Dissertation Title:  RNA Hybridization and Protein Multimerization in and out of Equilibrium PhD Dissertation Advisor:  Dr. Michael P. Brenner, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

I first got interested in Biophysics through the Integrated Science Curriculum at Princeton, where I was an undergrad in the Physics department. At Princeton, I worked with Ned Wingreen on how bacterial ribosomes search for the start codon on mRNA, David Huse on phase transitions in the q=3 Potts model, and Ben Machta on how the near-criticality of the cell membrane leads to interesting effects on ion channels. For my dissertation I then worked with Michael Brenner on developing a computational algorithm using polymer physics to completely enumerate the free energy landscape of RNA secondary structure. I was interested in using this tool both for RNA secondary structure prediction as well as for biologically-inspired materials design.