Physics of Biological Systems

Very recently, problems involving biological systems have attracted much of my attention. Indeed, there are a lot problems in Biology in which physicists can contribute. Moreover, due to the complexity present in biological systems, the phenomena that emerge from this complexity have a great appeal to physicists. From the wide range of problems where Physics and Biology overlaps, I am mainly interested in studying evolutionary dynamics:

Speciation in Sympatry: For a long time, it was believed that new species can only appear if two populations were kept spatially isolated (allopatry) from each other during a period of time long enough to promote a genetic drifting in both populations. When these two populations were brought together, they are so different from each other that there is no interbreeding. However, plenty of examples in nature that contradict this hypothesis. An important case of speciation in sympatry (without spacial isolation) is the cichlid fishes in African lakes. My interest is to understand how new species appear in sympatry. One possible mechanism that could lead to speciation is the assortative mating in which the mating is not completely random.
I am also interested in problems of extinction of species in neutral models. In such problems, only the complexity of the dynamics can leads to the disappearing of an entire cluster of individuals.