Grainger College of Engineering Seminars & Speakers

Abstract:  How do collections of amino acids in proteins, proteins in cells, or cells in tissues act together to do complicated things that approach intelligence? To explore this foundational question, I will argue that it is useful to think of complex function as emerging from systems made of tunable matter: collections of physical components that interact with each other in ways that can be adjusted to produce collective behavior. We already encounter this idea in familiar settings. The genome, for example, is tuned over generations through mutation and selection to enhance survival, while the brain adapts far more rapidly by tuning connections between neurons, and AI networks are trained by adjusting network parameters. I will introduce the broader concept of tunable matter, which extends far beyond genes and brains to many other systems. Through a few accessible examples, I will show how this perspective might allow us to build a unifying framework for the emergence of collective function in biological systems, and how similar principles can be used to design electronic circuits that learn AI tasks on their own, without a computer, at remarkably low energy cost.

Biography:  Andrea Liu uses theory and computation to do research in soft and living matter.  She was a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA for ten years before joining the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, where she is the Hepburn Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Soft and Living Matter. She is also on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). She is a former Councilor of the NAS, former Speaker of the Council of the APS, former chair and councilor of the Physics Section of the AAAS, and current Vice-Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. She is the 2025 recipient of the APS Leo P. Kadanoff Prize.