9/23/2008
The National Science Foundation announced this month that it is funding a new Physics Frontiers Center at Illinois. The Center for the Physics of Living Cells is one of nine Physics Frontiers Centers in the U.S., and the second to explore the physics of biological systems. The $7.5 million award will be supplemented with a 10% matching grant from the university, bringing the total funding to $8.25 million over five years. "As the title of the center says, understanding life on the basis of physics is really one of the great frontiers of modern science," said Klaus Schulten, holder of the Swanlund Chair in Physics at Illinois. Schulten and Taekjip Ha, a professor of physics, an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will co-direct the center.