Jeff Gore (cvgoogle scholarpersonal site)
Professor, Department of Physics
PhD Physics, UC Berkeley (2005)
BS Physics, Mathematics, Economics, & Electrical Eng @ MIT
gore@mit.edu
Office:  NE46-609 (map)   Phone:  617-715-4251    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 AwardNIH K99/R00 Pathways to Independence Award, and an NSF CAREER Award. In addition, Jeff is a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical SciencesSloan 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
Postdocs
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
Physics of Living Systems @MIT

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.
  • 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.


Funding Sources
















William Bloxham
Physics Graduate Student (2017 start)
BS Physics
wbloxham at mit.edu
Office: NE46-629

Will is exploring how a microbial community depends upon the resources that are available.
Simon Lax (google scholar)
PhD Ecology and Evolutionary, Univ of Chicago (2017)
Office:  NE46-633

Simon's graduate work probed the microbiome of the indoor environment, and in the Gore Lab he has started by studying how microbial communities change with temperature.   
GORElaboratory
 Ecological Systems Biology
Hyunseok Lee
Physics Graduate Student (2016 start)
BS Physics, Caltech
hlee2 at mit.edu
Office: NE46-606

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 is studying how resource-explicit models may provide insight into the composition of multispecies communities.

Martina Dal Bello (google scholar)
PhD Ecology, University of Pisa (2014)
Office:  NE46-610
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. 
Avihu Yona (google scholar)
HFSP Postoctoral Fellow
PhD Weizmann Institute of Science (2013)
Office:  NE46-633
avihuy at mit.edu

In his doctoral research Avihu utilized experimental evolution to study the evolutionary dynamics of genomic duplications like aneuploidy and families of homologous genes. In the Gore and Alm labs, he is interested in how complex populations evolve as whole biological entity and which evolutionary forces can be applied to reshape such populations towards desirable traits. In his first project, he has demonstrated that random sequences can evolve to be a functional promoter de novo (Yona et al, bioRxiv, 2017).
Jiliang Hu
MechE Graduate student (2017 start)
BS Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua Univ
Jiliang@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 is studying the role of migration in population dynamics and biodiversity of metacommunities. 
Shreyas Gokhale (google scholar)
​HFSP / PLS Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD Physics, IISc (2015) 
​Office: NE46-629
gokhales at mit.edu

Shreyas was trained as a soft-matter experimentalist but has recently joined our group to do experiments with microbial communities. He is interested in spatially extended populations, synchronization of oscillations, and the role of migration in population collapse.  
Clare Abreu 
Physics Graduate Student (2014 start)
BS English, Pomona College, MS Physics 
cabreu at mit.edu
Office: NE46-610

Clare started as a theoretical condensed matter physicist but has recently decided to become an experimental biophysicist. In the Gore Lab she is exploring the structure of multi-species ecosystems under stress. She has demonstrated that increased mortality changes the structure of communities in predictable ways.
Jana Huisman (google scholar)
PhD Physics


Jana is starting with us winter of 2022 / 2023!
Sivan Pearl (google scholar)
Fulbright, EMBO Postoctoral Fellow
PhD Hebrew University (2015)
Office:  NE46-631

Sivan is studying the stability and resilience of marine microbial communities as well as the evolutionary response of bacteria to antibiotics.
Anthony Ortiz
Microbiology Graduate Student (2016 start)
Biotechnology, UNAM, Mexico
tonyfol at mit.edu
Office: NE46-610

Anthony is interested in how interactions between species determines the structure of microbial communities. In his first project, Anthony demonstrated that simple assembly rules can predict the composition of the gut microbiome of the worm C. elegans. Next, he collaborated with the Blainey lab to characterize interspecies interactions using a droplet-based microfluidic assay.