Laufer Center Seminar by Arvind Murugan
Arvind Murugan
Associate Professor
Dept. of Physics and James Franck Institute
University of Chicago
December 5, 2025 12:30 PM
Laufer Center Lecture Hall 101
Title: Embodied learning and computation in molecular networks
Dense, promiscuous molecular interaction networks provide a natural platform for embodied computation in cells. In such systems, each species interacts with many others. As a result, collective phase behavior can naturally show neural computation, with a rich range of high dimensional mappings from inputs to outputs, without needing to engineer molecules to act like elements of a neural network. I will show, using theory and experiments, that these collective processes can realize robust computation and in situ physical learning without backpropagation when concentrations of “hidden” species adapt according to a molecular Hebbian principle of “get together, grow to like each other.” This adaptive rewiring allows the network to learn desired behaviors in complex mixtures within a single cellular lifetime. Because our framework exploits collective behaviors that already occur naturally among molecules, this approach to molecular computation and learning is inherently compact and robust, suggesting new routes to information processing in cells and new design principles for synthetic biology.
Host: Ken Dill
