STUDENT PROFILES
Erez Lieberman
Area
Applied Mathematics and GenomicsFocus
Lieberman is currently working on large-scale immunoprofiling, a technique for sequencing all of a person’s antibodies in about an hour. He is also author of part of the text for City of Salt, a book featuring panoramic photographs of fantastical landscapes.Education
Princeton University, A.B. Mathematics; Yeshiva University, M.A. HistoryYou get the sense that people here truly care about interesting phenomena, and will use whatever means necessary to comprehend them.
That means you can do physics one day, math the next, then experimental biology, then computer science—whatever it takes—and you don’t have to apologize to anyone for it.
It’s not just interdisciplinary; it’s pandisciplinary.
When I arrived, I knew that I liked the methods of mathematics and physics, but that I wanted to work on biology. So I started out by investigating some beautiful problems at the interface of graph theory and the theory of evolution with Professor Martin Nowak, Professor of Mathematics and Biology and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and with Michael Brenner, Professor of Applied Mathematics.
But I wanted to start working on problems with immediate medical implications, so I started working on the world’s fastest evolutionary system, the human immune system, with MIT’s Eric Lander at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute.
I think there’s no better place than here for seeing the full breadth of the mathematical transformation that is rewiring biology.