Brian Camley

Seconded. If anything, it has never been a better time to be a biophysicist, a complex system physicists, etc…. And it is a bit sad that much of it now happens *outside* of physics departments (for good and bad reasons…)

Call for Applications: Editor-in-Chief of Biophysical Journal The Biophysical Society is seeking the next Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s flagship publication, Biophysical Journal. This appointment will begin January 1, 2027, for one five-year term. The…

BPS is seeking the next Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s flagship publication, Biophysical Journal

Are you a junior scientist working in theoretical biophysics? @zamakany.bsky.social and I are organizing another workshop this fall here at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. Travel and the workshop expenses are all covered!

tinyurl.com/yc66fawc

I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms

Check out this story! Atlantic writer Alexandra Petri visited my lab and played with some fruit flies and human organoids as she wrote about experiencing things that were affected by government cuts.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Memory from variability: Heritable short-term cellular memory emerges from stochastic biochemical reaction networks Cells exhibit a mysterious form of selective heritable short-term memory, influencing outcomes as diverse as cell fate decisions in embryos and environmental responses in cancer cells and bacteria. He...

Thrilled that the lab's first @hhmijanelia.bsky.social project is up on bioRxiv! Story behind the story to follow. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is actually a pretty big deal - it gives people whose eligibility to renew is expiring a shot at submitting with the additional data and productivity of the last half year. It would be better if NIH delayed the deadline but I know a bunch of PIs who are now slightly less screwed by the shutdown

She let me know that they recently received guidance that, ONLY for the January EI deadline (1/27/2026) and the February ESI deadline (2/3/2026), PIs can submit MIRAs even if their previous application (R35, R01, R15, R21, and R37) is still considered under review.

The path to this paper has so many stories.

Today I want to tell one about the value of saying so when you don't have the answer - and of the importance of community.

Fishing email saying that a student has filed a report for my class

This fishing email *almost* got me….its that time of year when semester is almost over and weird stuff happens and tired profs are almost the perfect targets here

We’re hiring!

The Department of Physics
@sfuphysics.bsky.social
at Simon Fraser U (in beautiful and vibrant Vancouver) seeks applications for an Assistant or Associate Professor in Experimental Biophysics, encompassing all scales of life from molecules to ecosystems.
@sfuscience.bsky.social

We are opening a FACULTY POSITION (tenure track, permanent) in the University of Cambridge at the interface of control and biology, interpreted broadly. Theorists and wet lab quantitative biologists with backgrounds in control, EE, applied math, ... apply by Jan 28!

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

Recognizing bad mentors: "One problem student is a concern. Two problem students is a trend. Three problem students is an established pattern." But this is also why evaluating mentorship is hard. Faculty are tenured with small-n student count - and sometimes the victims won't show up in that count

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

screenshot of nature's search feature that shows you can only enter "start page / article no."

Is there an easy way to actually find an article for Nature Communications without a title if you know its article number? Nature's search has the same problem - if you look for article 1, you find all the other articles: www.nature.com/search/advan...

Bug in Springer Nature metadata may be causing ‘significant, systemic’ citation inflation Millions of researchers could be affected by a “dramatic distortion of citation counts” likely caused by flaws in how the academic publishing giant Springer Nature handles article metadata, accordi…

Is your paper article #1 in a volume in Nature Communications? Then in some records you may be getting all the citations for all the other articles - because exported citations can default to "starting page" (always 1) instead of "article number"

We’re hiring! 🚨
Assistant Professor (TT) in Theoretical or Computational Biological Physics @univmiami.bsky.social 😀

Come build the future of interdisciplinary biophysics with us!
Apply by Dec 15 → tinyurl.com/5n9bk836

#Biophysics #PhysicsJobs #AcademicJobs #UMiami

Marge Simpson, holding a CG membrane simulation snapshot: "I just think they're neat!"

"Why do you like membrane bending simulations so much?"

Ten years ago, I saw a paper with some data that has bothered me ever since: B cells in a 0-100 ng/mL gradient of CCL19 are attracted to CCL19, but B cells in 0-500 ng/mL are repelled (see movie, ignoring the big clusters for now!). Why? Here's our model! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

This is the work of Grace Luettgen, a very talented @jhu.edu Physics + Biophysics undergraduate - so keep an eye out for her!

Model showing SNR predicted to switch sign as a function of distance along a device so cells to the left are attracted and cells to the right are repelled, leading to a stable equilibrium

Lots of other predictions, tests. We are hoping this stimulates some further experiments to try to prove us wrong! In particular, our model would predict that cells should be attracted to a particular point in the device - and we don't see this immediately in the data (but can't rule it out).

Fig. 4B of the preprint shows SNR is mostly positive if CCR7 cannot internalize

Why does internalization matter for chemorepulsion? Internalization decreases the amount of bound receptor. If you inhibit it, you get more bound receptor - and you get attraction again!

Fig. 4A of the preprint shows SNR switches from positive to negative to positive as a function of ligand concentration [L]mid in a linear gradient from 0 to 2 [L]mid

We then propagate error from the noise in the ligand-receptor binding to the noise in the response, and work out the signal-to-noise. The triangle is the 0-500 ng/mL experiment - repelled! The square is the 0-100 ng/mL experiment - attracted!

Description of Fig. 3 AB from the text: "The form of Eq. (11) as a ratio of two nonlinear functions can lead to multiple switches between chemorepulsion and attraction. We show an example in Fig. 3A in which I undergoes a rapid transition between its basal level and a high level as pb increases (i.e. a large hI), and A slowly saturates as pb increases. We see that at small pb, I does not change much, while A increases – leading to an increase in R = A/I. Then, at the transition point where pb ≈ KI, I increases rapidly with pb, leading to a decrease in R. Then, as I saturates, while A continues to increase, R will increase again. We plot dR/dpb for this case in Fig. 3B, seeing that we have chemoattraction at small pb and large pb, but in the intermediate range where dR/dpb is negative, there will be chemorepulsion; this chemorepulsive region is shaded in blue throughout Fig. 3."

Why does response switch from increasing to decreasing as you go toward larger chemoattractant (larger probability of bound receptor)? If A and I are nonlinear functions of the bound receptor, the ratio of the two R = A/I can easily switch between being increasing and decreasing- chemorepulsion!

Nonlinear feedforward loop with bound receptor activating A, I nonlinearly, and A activating R, I inhibiting R, and R the response - sets the direction the cell travels

Then we take an idea from earlier work on growth cones and assume bound receptor regulates the eventual response of the cell via a nonlinear feedforward loop.

Fig 1AB of the paper, 1A showing the model for ligand-dependent internalization, Fig 1B showing how the % surface receptor decreases with time in model and experiment

Because we know internalization is important, we start with the simplest possible model for ligand-dependent internalization, which does reasonably at capturing the timescale for the experiments.

Malet-Engra et al. find chemorepulsion depends on endocytosis doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... - so maybe cells take in CCL19, shaping the gradient around them, somehow reversing it, akin to self-generated gradients? We don't rule this out, but think the data can be explained at a single-cell level.

Using endocytosis to switch between chemoattraction and chemorepulsion https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.28.685129v1

Ten years ago, I saw a paper with some data that has bothered me ever since: B cells in a 0-100 ng/mL gradient of CCL19 are attracted to CCL19, but B cells in 0-500 ng/mL are repelled (see movie, ignoring the big clusters for now!). Why? Here's our model! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I am teaching Intro to Math Bio (ugrad math about junior level) next semester and I wanted to ask around:
1. If you have taught a similar class, which book have you used and what did you like/dislike about it? (I have the one used previously from another prof and I have a few of my own and

Fair!