Greg Stephens
Theoretical physicist thinking about living and complex systems. Faculty at VU Amsterdam & OIST Graduate University
- Reposted by Greg StephensExcited to return to Lisbon this June for the epic 3-week Cajal course on Quantitative Approaches to Behavior and VR! 🐀🐟🪰🏃♀️🎥🖥📈🧪 Applications are open through Feb 13! Come join us. cajal-training.org/on-site/quan...
- Reposted by Greg StephensCall is out for Champalimaud International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme 2026! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
- Reposted by Greg StephensBoris Shraiman points a physicist’s eye on biological quandaries news.ucsb.edu/2025/022264/... 🧪
- Physics of Behavior comes to the DPG Spring Meeting, Mar 8-13 in Dresden, DE! Co-organized w/ @promanczuk.bsky.social, we welcome contributions using physical approaches to understand biological behavior across scales—from microorganisms to humans, and from individual to collective dynamics.
- During submission choose "SOE: Physics of Socio-economic Systems Division" and on the following page pick the topic "Focus Session: Physics of Behavior". Deadline is Dec 1st, 2025. www.dpg-tagung.de/dd26/submiss...
- An excellent opportunity for early-career researchers! Fellows receive salary comparable to an Assistant Professor position and research funds. For 2026, the program invites theory‑focused researchers in natural sciences and technology: www.oist.jp/research/bur... @oistedu.bsky.social
- Yay for worms!
I'll never get tired of these. (courtesy of Sebasitan Wittekindt doi.org/10.1101/2025...)
- Within 7 years of the start of your independent position, apply for the APS DBIO early career award! engage.aps.org/dbio/honors/...
- As a former selection committee member, I can say it's really quite a joy to learn about all of your interesting directions!
- Fun!
- And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...
- This looks really cool!
- Complex behaviour is not limited to animals! Here we map the entire spectrum of waveforms dynamics on a quadriflagellate single cell with 4x 70um (!) #cilia, to a low dimensional behavioural manifold with surprising structure! #protistsonsky All revealed in our new preprint doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- This is good!
- Great course in a beautiful and storied location!
- 📢🧠 #Neuroscience researchers: Level up your skills and reimagine behavior quantification at @jacksonlab.bsky.social's #MachineLearning Course from Oct. 12 – 17. Organized by @vivekdna.bsky.social, @gordonberman.bsky.social, @goldenneuron.bsky.social & Ann Kennedy. More details and link below 👇
- This will be quite fun! Join us in September for "“Physics of Adaptation & Decision Making in Biology” www.fluidlab.nl/padm25
- Reposted by Greg StephensIt was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...
- Reposted by Greg StephensWe have a postdoc opening for a protistologist with biophysics inclinations to join our @hfspo.bsky.social project! (focus will be on characterising the morphology, ultrastructure and behaviour of excavates) #protistsonsky Apply by Sept 17th (RTs appreciated!) jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...
- Well-deserved!
- Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...
- Time for more "Physics of Behavior" in single-cell settings! @micromotility.bsky.social @koseskalab.bsky.social
- Cool...but also...eew! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
- (1/4) I’m happy to introduce our new work led by PhD student Akira Kawano (not on Bluesky), which explores social behavior as mutual prediction, quantified by the decomposition of information (PID) between the past and future of a multi-organism system: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- (2/4) Even in this era of pose tracking of almost any organism, the analysis of social behavior is challenging, often using specific assays and human-derived labels. We instead suggest that redundant, unique, and synergistic predictive information flows provide a natural set of social variables.
- (3/4) We ground our approach in the body trajectories of two adult zebrafish engaged in a dominance contest. We find that information flows align with concepts such as dominance and mirroring, and that asymmetries in self-unique and redundant information reflect the emergent dominance relationship.
- (4/4) In mecp2 mutants, an autism model, we show that predictive information is reduced overall, but especially for synergistic flows, an indication of difficulties in more complex social behaviors. We look forward to a continuing conversation about what it means to be (quantitatively) social!
- Oh yes!
- Reposted by Greg StephensFor the first time, scientists have filmed microscopic worms called nematodes in the wild as they glom together and form large wriggling masses. Learn more: scim.ag/3FBwSx3
- Revolutionary when idTracker first came on the scene, so really excited to get to know the new approach!
- It took us many years to improve idtracker.ai in both accuracy and tracking time. Here it is.
- Reposted by Greg StephensThe OIST Graduate School has opened a Special PhD Admissions Portal for students currently enrolled in, or accepted to, universities in the U.S. #PhDProgram www.oist.jp/admissions/s...
- Reposted by Greg StephensPhD students interested in ecology and evolution -- consider applying. Reach out to me if you are interested in discussing. www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...
- A vital and very enjoyable component of my academic work is teaching students at all levels how to extend the frontiers of knowledge. So I’m pleased to announce a set of Jupyter notebooks organized around our ideas for “physics of behavior”. You can find them here: github.com/oist/Physics...
- The tutorials explore principal components analysis, state space embedding, and Markov modeling, all through the dynamics of posture. They are the result of tremendous contributions from my own group members, as well as constructive feedback from participants at special-topics schools.
- We are happy for feedback and plan to add more!
- Reposted by Greg StephensObit for Peter Lax, an applied mathematician who did pioneering work in PDEs, solitons, and computational science. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/s...
- Reposted by Greg StephensIt was a great conference with such diverse topics. The interactive discussion rounds were particularly stimulating! Congratulations to the organizers for making such a stimulating conference possible 🎉
- Reposted by Greg StephensAfter three years do we finally have a definition of what is a theory? Or more importantly, why biology continues to confound physicists...? (By James DiFrisco) Also importance of evolutionary context from Crick's autobiography! #EESTCBio
- Reposted by Greg StephensIt was great fun chatting with Avaneesh Narla about the physics of behavior across species, and its implications for neuroscience, ecology and evolution. Check out his "Kugelblitz" podcast for great science content! open.spotify.com/episode/0pMC...
- Reposted by Greg StephensHow Rat Watching Can Yield Benefits for People New AI method lets researchers get better handle on brain-behavior link, and may offer insights into disorders like autism. From @olveczky.bsky.social and colleagues. Co-first authors Ugne Klibaite and Tianqing Li. news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
- Reposted by Greg StephensRIP Jerry Ostriker, one of our most creative and influential theoretical astrophysicists. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s...
- Reposted by Greg StephensCan wriggling #worms inspire new principles in robot design? A new preprint from the @bhamlalab.bsky.social, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and @sorbonne-universite.fr, describes how active filaments—like living worms—can efficiently gather tiny particles in confined spaces.
- A great opportunity!
- Reposted by Greg StephensOur lab is looking for a talented experimentalist, ideally with a background in biophysics, to study the dynamics of genome replication using sequencing: www.oist.jp/careers/expe...
- Reposted by Greg StephensFungi made Earth’s land liveable by building networks that released nutrients locked in primordial rock and supplied those nutrients to plant roots go.nature.com/41lvtBg
- This will be fun and interesting! ICTS-TIFR Bengaluru will offer a program on Unifying Theories in High-Dimensional Biophysics, 21 July - 01 Aug. Graduate students, postdocs and faculty are welcome, as are talented undergraduates. Apply here: register1.icts.res.in/uhdb. Deadline: 30 April
