Conference: Physics Meets Genomes

This award will partially cover the costs of an international meeting “Physics Meets Genomes Conference and Summer School” to be held at Institut d'Études Scientifiques in Cargèse, Corsica, France, during June 2025. The award will provide funding to support international travel of speakers, students, and junior scientists from the USA, as well as the work to develop the School and Conference. The School and Conference will bring together experts from France, the USA and other leading international researchers to foster knowledge dissemination, intellectual exchange, and training a new generation of students and early career researchers in the Physics of Living Systems. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in understanding 3D genome architecture and dynamics in living cells and their implications for biological function. This has been made possible by the advent of technologies that provide unprecedented information regarding the spatial organization of genomes, their variations between cell types and species, and their temporal dynamics. This, in turn, has led to a flowering of theories, combining concepts from molecular biophysics, polymer science, and machine learning to create quantitatively accurate frameworks for confronting hypothesized mechanisms with experimental observations. The summer school for graduate students will provide hands on instruction from the basics of chromosome structure and function through more complicated aspects of research being explored in the field today. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.