Center for Living Systems

The Center for Living Systems (CLS) at the University of Chicago is a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center. CLS researchers study how living systems process cues from their environment to determine and adapt their form and function. This research inherently demands and will establish a new field of physics that focuses on how physical systems can store, retrieve, and process information to control complex behavior. The CLS will develop education and outreach programs to expand physics education, train the next generation of researchers and bring the joy of CLS research to the South Side of Chicago. Our faculty come from 10 departments at the University of Chicago across the physical and biological sciences and a leader in physics education from Northwestern University.

CLS research focuses on research at the frontiers of physics with the living world that explore the nature of how living matter encodes and exploits adaptive responses from molecular to ecological length scales and physiological to evolutionary time scales. This requires the development of physics of adaptation in strongly driven systems.  The research exploits recent capabilities to acquire large and high quality data in diverse biological systems and advances in artificial intelligence/machine learning. These approaches enable new strategies to study the physics of living systems. The research program is organized around three themes: Origins of Adaptive Mechanisms, Encoding information in morphogenetic systems, and Computation in Complex Networks and Environments.