Laufer Center Seminar - Martin Falk
Martin J Falk, Ph.D.
Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellow University of Chicago
February 17, 2026 at 1:00 PM
Laufer Center Lecture Hall 101
Title: Design principles for adaptive molecular matter
Life is a strikingly improbable form of molecular matter, distinguished not only by its exceptional functional properties, but also by its potential to dynamically exhibit new functions in response to a changed environment - in other words, by its ability to adapt. What physical principles allow for the emergence of these adaptive abilities? In this talk, I will show examples of simple processes that embed adaptive ability into molecular systems across many different contexts; for instance, how time-varying selective pressures create rapid mutational function-switching in soft materials; how cooperative replicative dynamics result in error correction when genomic information is distributed across many autocatalytic oligomers; and, how rate-sensitive plasticity allows for trainable computation in molecular interaction networks.
