Professor, Department of Physics
PhD Physics, UC Berkeley (2005)
BS Physics, Mathematics, Economics, & Electrical Eng @ MIT
gore@mit.edu
Office: 4-332h (map) Lab: 617-324-7861
Jeff's research interests have ranged widely, from the current focus on ecological dynamics to his single-molecule research in graduate school with the Bustamante laboratory. Before starting his own lab, Jeff was a Pappalardo Fellow in the Physics Department at MIT working with the van Oudenaarden laboratory studying cooperation and cheating in yeast.
Jeff's honors include a Schmidt Science Polymath Award, NIH New Innovator Award, NIH K99/R00 Pathways to Independence Award, and an NSF CAREER Award. In addition, Jeff is a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, Sloan Research Fellow, and an Allen Distinguished Investigator. He has also been recognized at MIT for his efforts in teaching and mentoring; in 2011 he was chosen as the MIT-wide undergraduate research (UROP) mentor of the year and in 2013 he received the Buechner Teaching Award from the Physics Department.
PI
Administrative Assistant
Graduate Students
Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Gore Laboratory
Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Physics of Living Systems Group
400 Technology Square, NE46-602
Cambridge, MA 02139
Past Members
Postdocs
- Jonathan Friedman (2013 - 2017) is now an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. As a postdoc with us Jonathan studied community assembly in microbes.
- Kirill Korolev (2010 - 2013) is now an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at Boston University. As a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow, he collaborated with us on a number of projects probing the spatial dynamics of populations.
- Alfonso Perez Escudero (2014 - 2017) now has a CNRS position in Tolouse, France.
- Christoph Ratzke (2013 - 2019) is now an Assistant Professor at the Univ of Tubingen, Germany.
- Alvaro Sanchez (2011 - 2013) is now a Junior Fellow at the Rowland Institute and in 2016 will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Yale. With us he studied the coupling between population and evolutionary dynamics in a cooperatively growing microbe (Sanchez and Gore, PLOS Biology (2013))
- Nicole Vega (2013 - 2017) is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Emory University.
- Andrea Velenich (2010 - 2014) is a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Good Start Genetics.
Graduate Students
- Tatiana Artemova (PhD 2015) works works at Morgan Stanley.
- Kevin Axelrod (PhD 2016) is a consultant with McKinsey & Company.
- Hasan Celiker (PhD 2014) is the founder of Xeno Biosciences, a startup pioneering a novel class of treatments targeting the human gut microbiome to treat metabolic diseases, with an initial focus on general obesity.
- Manoshi Datta (PhD 2016) is now a postdoc with Roy Kishony.
- Lei Dai (PhD 2014) is now studying viral fitness landscapes with Jamie Lloyd-Smith at UCLA. Lei's work with us focused on the experimental measurement of early warning indicators before catastrophic population collapse. For this work Lei received the APS Division of Biological Physics Thesis Prize in 2014.
- Dave Healey (PhD 2015) is now a data scientist in Utah.
- Logan Higgins (PhD 2017) is now an instructor at Northeastern University.
- Daan Vorselen (2010) was a visiting Masters students with us and is now a postdoc at Stanford University.
- Eugene Yurtsev (PhD 2015) is a software & machine learning engineer at Kensho.
Undergraduate Researchers
- Hui Xiao "Sherry" Chao (2009 - 2012) is an MD/PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill.
- Andrew Chen (2012 - 2013) was an undergraduate researcher in the group studying the dynamics of a producer-parasite population before collapse (Chen*, Sanchez*, et al, Nature Communications, 2014)
- Ivana Cvijovic (2011) is now a graduate student in the Harvard Systems Biology PhD program (our fourth such student!).
- Carmel Dudley (2011 - 2012) explored the evolutionary consequences of the fact that bacteria often collectively grow in antibiotics.
- Ylaine Gerardin (2010) studied the conditions that favor the evolution of antibiotic resistance, and is now a graduate student in the Harvard Systems Biology PhD program working with Roy Kishony and Mike Springer.
- Teresa Krieger (2011) was part of the MIT-Cambridge Exchange Program. She worked with us probing the behavior of populations at the edge of collapse, and is now in the Physics PhD Program at Oxford.
- Sophia Li (2011 - 2012) explored conditions in which bacterial strains could survive multi-drug treatments via a mutualism. She is now at Princeton with the Quantitative Biology PhD Program.
- Anthony Ortiz (2015 - 2016) is now a PhD student in the MIT Microbiology Program.
- Stephen Serene (2009 - 2010) worked with us as a sophomore collaborating with Longzhi Tan in a study quantifying the reversibility of evolution on a rugged fitness landscape (Tan*, Serene*, Chao, and Gore, Physical Review Letters (2011)). He then did computational neuroscience with Sebastian Seung before going to Rockefeller for his PhD.
- Mashaal Sohail (2011) worked with Hasan Celiker probing how competition between species can favor cooperation within a species. She is now a graduate student in the Harvard Systems Biology Program.
- Longzhi Tan (2009 - 2011) quantified the reversibility of evolution during adaptation to antibiotics (Tan et al, Phys Rev Lett (2011)). He also demonstrated computationally that slowly switching between environments increases the reversibility of evolution (Tan et al, Evolution (2012)). He is now working with Sunney Xie as a graduate student in the Harvard Systems Biology Departement.
Blox Bloxham
Physics Graduate Student (2017 start)
BS Physics
wbloxham at mit.edu
Office: 4-332b
Blox is exploring the role of sequential resource utilization in determining the diversity and dynamics of microbial communities. They found that species can coexist in cases where the fast-grower is a slow-switcher between resources, and that competitive exclusion can be violated due to oscillations.
GORElaboratory
Ecological Systems Biology
Hyunseok Lee (google scholar)
Physics of Living Systems Fellow
BS Physics, Caltech
PhD Physics, MIT
hlee2 at mit.edu
Office: 4-332c
Hyunseok started his PhD as a high-energy theorist but then realized that it is better to be an experimental biophysicist! In the Gore Lab he studied resource competition and spatially expanding populations. He is now a PLS Postdoctoral Fellow studying emergent dynamics in space.
PhD Ecology, University of Pisa (2014)
Office: 4-332f
dalbello at mit.edu
Martina was trained as an ecologist doing field experiments on intertidal communities. In the Gore lab she is studies how resource availability shapes microbial communities. She will be starting her own group soon
Jiliang Hu
MechE Graduate student (2017 start)
BS Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua Univ
Jiliang at mit.edu
Office: NE46-606
Jiliang studied biomechanics as an undergraduate student at Tsinghua Univ. In the Gore lab he is interested in exploring the high-dimensional dynamics and emergent phenomena of complex microbial communities. In his first project, he demonstrated that multi-species communities can be described by a phase diagram as a function of the strength of interspecies interactions and the diversity of the species pool. He is now studying alternative stable states and the role of migration in the dynamics and biodiversity of metacommunities.
HFSP / PLS Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD Physics, IISc (2015)
Office: 4-332b
gokhales at mit.edu
Shreyas joined our group as an HFSP Fellow and studied the synchronization of oscillations in spatially extended populations. He is now an independent PLS Postdoctoral Fellow, where he is focused on soft matter physics.
Jana Huisman (google scholar)
HFSP Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD Physics
Jana started with us winter of 2022 / 2023 and is studying non-transitive interactions due to plasmid-based interactions and potentially universal changes to communities associated with salinity.
Postoctoral Scholar
PhD Molecular Cell Biology
Office: 4-332b
William was trained as a microbiologist studying the dynamics of biofilm formation and the ultrastructure of microbial populations through high resolution scanning electron microscopy. He is interested in how interactions between microbial species determine the structure of complex communities important to human hosts. In the Gore lab, his work focuses on the drivers of multistability in microbial communities.
Jinyeop Song
Physics Graduate Student
Office: 4-332b
Jinyeop is studying community coalescence and the evolution of communities.
Postdocs
Tader Shipley
Office: 4-332
tshipley at mit.edu
Tader keeps the Physics of Living Systems group running smoothly, and is also responsible for the interdepartmental biophysics activities across campus.
Yizhou Liu
MechE Graduate student
BS Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua Univ
Office: 4-332
Yizhou is starting by studying the emergent structure and dynamics of resource-competing communities.
Shreyansh Umale
Microbiology Graduate Student
Office: 4-332f
Shreyansh is exploring the role of cell death and nutrient scavenging within multispecies communities.
