Academia Sinica Logo

I am Jian-geng Chiou. I call myself a biologist when I need an excuse for sucking at physics and call myself a physicist when I honestly cannot remember that many genes.

I was trained as a biologist as an undergraduate. I then went to Duke University to pursue a Ph.D. and my interest in evolutionary genetics. Less than a year later, I ditched my original interest and studied how a budding yeast bud. That question accidentally became a physics problem of how certain proteins spontaneously pattern in the yeast cell. Before I realized it, I started to spend equal amounts of time watching live cells under the microscope and mathematical models on the computer, and I attended more physics meetings than biology ones. After graduation, I went to do a postdoc at UCSD, and I started to study how bacterial biofilms pattern the expression of certain developmental genes and spatially control the development of spores.

I am starting my own lab (https://jchioulab.github.io/landing.html) at the Institute of Plant and Molecular Biology in Academia Sinica, Taiwan, with the general theme of “Patterning principles in microbial developmental systems”. But seriously, this can be a microbiology question, a physics question, or even an evolution question. So who knows what our lab will be interested in 5 to 10 years later? Isn’t that exciting!