The Department of Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology is a home for research groups that focus on the function of living systems in general, and human body systems—in health and disease—in particular. The range of research activities within the department is wide, extending from single protein dynamics to whole body flows and forces, analyzed over sub-millisecond to many days and weeks. Standing at the basis of all these research activities is the insistence on studying processes rather than objects, taking the integrative-interactive point of view at multiple scales and levels of organization, rather than the point of view of the individual component at any given scale. Hence the set of applied concepts and tools: ranging from cellular and sub-cellular biology to whole organism behavior, and from biophysics to engineering. At the age of microscopic-molecular-genetic dominance we view our mission—actively protect and promote the integrative nature of physiology—no less than critical. Congruent with this, the department encourages its graduate students to acquire a broad view of structure and dynamics of the human body by taking infrastructural biophysics and physiology courses.
Faculty:
Department Chair, Izhak Kehat