Stanislas Leibler was born in 1957. He is a scientist who studies both biology and physics. He works as a professor in systems biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He also holds the title of Gladys T. Perkin Professor and leads the Laboratory of Living Matter at the Rockefeller University.

Education and career

Stanislas Leibler completed his master's degree in physics at the University of Warsaw. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1981 and another Ph.D. in physics in 1984, both from the University of Paris. He worked for one year at the École Normale Supérieure and then from 1984 to 1992 he was a Research Fellow at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. From 1985 to 1987, he was a Visiting Research Associate at Cornell University, and from 1989 to 1991, he worked as a Visiting Research Associate at ESPCI ParisTech in Paris.

He became a professor of physics at Princeton University and later joined the Department of Molecular Biology in 1993. He was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2000 to 2001 and served as a Tri-Institutional Professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College and the Sloan-Kettering Institute from 2003 to 2010. Since 2001, he has been a professor at The Rockefeller University. In 2009, he joined the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Leibler studies systems biology, which involves how genetic and biochemical networks interact at the cellular level in living organisms and populations. He and his colleagues created simple genetic networks in bacteria that function like clocks or logic circuits. A 2000 experiment with Michael Elowitz is considered a major achievement in synthetic biology. They designed a synthetic network to control gene regulation in E. coli and used fluorescent dye proteins to observe the system.

In 1997 and 1998, Leibler received the Humboldt Research Award from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBO) in Heidelberg. In 2015, he was awarded the Max Delbrück Prize by the American Physical Society. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Works

• with Doeke R. Hekstra: Uncertainty and patterns that can be measured in microbial ecosystems that are repeated in closed environments. In Cell 149, 1164–1173 (2012).
• with Arvind Murugan, David A. Huse: Speed, energy loss, and mistakes in a process that checks for errors. In Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 12034–12039 (2012).
• with José M. G. Vilar, Hao Yuan Kueh, Naama Barkai: Ways that genes that cycle on and off handle random changes. In Proc. Natl. Acad. USA, 99, 5988-5992 (2002).
• with Olivier Rivoire: How useful information is for groups of living things in changing environments. In J. Stat. Phys. 142, 1124–1166 (2011).
• with Călin C. Guet, Michael B. Elowitz, Weihong Hsing: Combining different parts to create networks of genes. In Science, 296, 1466-1470. (2002)
• with Leland H. Hartwell, John J. Hopfield, Andrew W. Murray: How cell biology moves from small parts to organized systems. In Nature 402, 913-917 (2 December 1999)
• with N. Barkai: Stability in simple chemical processes inside cells. In Nature 387, 913-917 (26 June 1997)
• with M. Dogterom, F. Verde and E. Karsenti: Control of changes over time and size of microtubules by proteins that manage cell processes in Xenopus egg extracts. In J. Cell Biol. 1992 118:1097-108.