Leonid Mirny
professor
Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Poland
Biography
A researcher in biophysics and computational biology, Prof. Leonid Mirny has taught HST.558 (Introduction to Modeling and Simulation), and has served on HST's Ph.D. Admissions Committee. Following his appointment to the MIT faculty in 2001, he taught Statistical Physics in Biology (8.398). A 1998 Harvard University graduate with a Ph.D. in Biophysics, Prof. Mirny was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He attended the Weizmann Institute of Science (Msc'94, Chemistry) and the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (Dip'92, Physics).
Research Interest
Professor Mirny's research focuses on computational structural and system biology. His multidisciplinary approach combines first-principle physics with the analysis of biological systems such as genes, proteins, and metabolic pathways. His efforts in computational structural biology involve the development of novel computational tools to analyze and predict structures of proteins, their complexes, and protein-DNA interactions. In these studies, Prof. Mirny seeks to identify amino acids that determine specific DNA recognition, to test these predictions in future experiments, and to find methods to engineer proteins with novel biological functions.
