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Andrea Liu – University of Pennsylvania

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT

Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT

Structure-Function Relations in Tuned Matter

I will argue that it is helpful to view complex collective function in physical systems, including biological ones, as emerging not from design but from optimization of systems made of tunable matter: collections of physical components that interact with each other in ways that can be adjusted individually to produce collective behavior. For example, proteins differ from random amino acid sequences in that they have been tuned: the choice of amino acid at each point in the sequence can be viewed as a tunable degree of freedom that has been determined by the process of biological evolution. Tunable matter differs fundamentally from conventional matter in that its emergent behavior can grow more complex with increasing system size, and poses an exciting challenge to condensed matter and statistical physics. For tuned matter with reciprocal interactions and function that is an equilibrium or steady-state response, I will describe a structure-function relation that we have derived, which identifies tunable degrees of freedom that are important for function.