Welcome

The Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center is a hub for research in Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University. We aim to advance biology and medicine through discoveries in physics, mathematics and computational science.

Laufer Center researchers study biochemical networks in cells. We use computational modeling to understand how proteins fold; design drugs for high-affinity binding to proteins; learn how protein motions cause biological mechanisms; explore the physical forces that drive proteins to aggregate in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; develop combinatorial computer algorithms for designing DNA sequences for synthetic biology; and more.

Center faculty are developing new graduate training programs, hosting seminars and workshops and catalyzing collaborations within and outside Stony Brook University. Laufer Center researchers come from a broad community including Stony Brook departments of chemistry, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, computer science, molecular genetics and microbiology; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory.