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The 2025 Karl Menger Lecture and Activities

April 10-11, 2025

Featured Speaker:

, Bren Professor of Computational Biology, California Institute of Technology

Title: 

A Mathematical Tour of the Molecular Biology of the Cell

Abstract: 

Recent technological advancements in genomics have enabled genome-wide measurements of transcriptional dynamics in cells, providing exceptional resolution for mathematical models in systems biology. I will survey the mathematical foundations of these models and theories, highlighting key discoveries and open problems at the intersection of mathematics and molecular biology.

Speaker bio:

Lior Pachter was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa where he attended . After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics from in 1994, He left for where he was awarded a in 1999. He then moved to the where he was a postdoctoral researcher (1999-2001), assistant professor (2001-2005), associate professor (2005-2009), and until 2018 the Raymond and Beverly Sackler professor of computational biology and professor of mathematics and molecular and cellular biology with a joint appointment in computer science. Since January 2017 he has been the Bren professor of computational biology at Caltech.

His research interests span the mathematical and biological sciences, and he has authored over 100 research articles in the areas of algorithms, combinatorics, comparative genomics, algebraic statistics, molecular biology and evolution. He has taught a in mathematics, computational biology and genomics. He is a and has been awarded a , a , the , and a for the successful technology transfer of widely used sequence alignment software developed in his group.

He is married to and has daughters.

Made possible with the generous support of the Menger family; Department of Applied Mathematics, Illinois Institute of Technology; and the Menger Fund.

2025 Activities Schedule