The Geometry of Multicellular Life

One of the most fundamental issues in evolutionary biology is how unicellular life transitioned to multicellular life. How — and why — was it that the simplest single-celled organisms that emerged from the primordial soup evolved into organisms with many cells and cell types dividing up life’s processes?

In this Presidential Lecture, Ray Goldstein will describe recent experimental and theoretical advances in understanding the architecture of organisms that serve as models of this evolutionary transition. He will discuss the shape-shifting properties of certain choanoflagellates (the closest living relatives of animals) and the recent discovery of common probability distributions of cellular neighborhood volumes in yeast and alga. He will also discuss embryonic ‘inversion’ and the spontaneous curling of the extracellular matrix of green algae. These studies together shed light on the fundamental question, “How do cells produce structures external to themselves in an accurate and robust manner?”

Goldstein uses both experiment and theory to understand living systems from the perspective of physics and mathematics. His work has been recognized by the Stephanos Pnevmatikos Award in Nonlinear Science, the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Mechanics, and the Rosalind Franklin Medal of the Institute of Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the Royal Society. He shared an Ig Nobel Prize for explaining the shape of ponytails.