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Experience shows that disciplinary science cannot describe life without contradictions. We show that one of the fundamental reasons is the disciplinarity itself: the disciplines deal with a limited set of quantities. This way some 'outlaw'…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed…
The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
Biological and artificial information processing systems form representations of the world that they can use to categorize, reason, plan, navigate, and make decisions. How can we measure the similarity between the representations formed by…
Biology is data-rich, and it is equally rich in concepts and hypotheses. Part of trying to understand biological processes and systems is therefore to confront our ideas and hypotheses with data using statistical methods to determine the…
Undergraduate physics students are known to have difficulties with understanding mathematical tools, and with applying their knowledge of mathematics to physical contexts. Using survey statements based on student interviews and written…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
Biological organisms are composed of numerous interconnected biochemical processes. Diseases occur when normal functionality of these processes is disrupted. Thus, understanding these biochemical processes and their interrelationships is a…
From a department being resistant to change to students not buying into the new computational activities, the challenges that are faced with integrating computation into the physics undergraduate curriculum are varied. The Partnership for…
Most, if not all, physics undergraduate degree programs include instructional lab experiences. Physics lab instructors, both faculty and staff, are instrumental to student learning in instructional physics labs. However, the faculty-staff…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Integrative biological simulations have a varied and controversial history in the biological sciences. From computational models of organelles, cells, and simple organisms, to physiological models of tissues, organ systems, and ecosystems,…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as "disorder" or "chaos" come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized…
We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…
Recent developments in machine-learning algorithms have led to impressive performance increases in many traditional application scenarios of artificial intelligence research. In the area of deep reinforcement learning, deep learning…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…