
Terry Hwa is Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair at U.C. San Diego, with joint appointment in the Department of Physics and the Division of Biological Sciences. He received his B.S. degree in Physics, Biology and Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in Physics from MIT. He continued his post-doctoral research in statistical physics studying superconductivity at Harvard University, and was a long-term member at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the physics faculty at U.C. San Diego. Dr. Hwa is an active proponent of interdisciplinary research, being the founder and director of the Graduate Program in Quantitative Biology at U.C. San Diego. Over the past decade, the Hwa lab pioneered a quantitative, predictive approach to study bacterial physiology, and is continuing to extend their approach to characterize bacterial species singly and in consortium, to uncover underlying principles governing the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities.