Ilya Nemenman is one of only two recipients of this year’s Simons Investigators award for Theoretical Physics in Life Sciences, honoring “outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists.” The appointment is renewable, with an initial period of five years, providing annually $100k in research support plus $10k for the department. In their announcement, the Simons Foundation cites Nemenman for his work “on theoretical understanding of biological information processing, aiming to build models that show physics-level precision in agreeing with experimental data.” He and his collaborators were some of the first groups to estimate information-theoretic channel capacity of protein signaling pathways, analyze statistical properties of activity of large genetic and neural networks, discover collective cellular sensing in development, decode high-precision timing codes in neural motor control, and model dynamics of complex animal behavior, such as a bird learning its song.
Please see the reference link: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-investigators/?