IGSP Faculty

Nicolas Buchler, PhD

Assistant Professor, Departments of Biology and Physics

Nicolas Buchler is an IGSP Investigator and Assistant Professor with joint appointment in the Departments of Biology and Physics. He received his Ph.D in Biophysics from the University of Michigan in 2001, under the supervision of Richard Goldstein. This was followed by two postdoctoral fellowships with Terence Hwa at the University of California, San Diego and Frederick Cross at the Rockefeller University. His postdoctoral training was supported by an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioinformatics and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface. He joined the Duke faculty in 2009.

Threshold responses and combinatorial control, bistability ('epigenetic switches') and oscillation ('clocks', 'cell cycle') in regulatory networks are essential for patterning, cell proliferation, and cell differentiation in developmental systems. The Buchler lab takes an interdisciplinary approach (theory and experiment; physics and biology; synthetic and systems biology) to understand the diverse molecular and evolutionary mechanisms by which thresholds and combinatorial control, bistability and oscillation have evolved in biological systems.

Recent Publications