This course provides an introduction to self-organization and multi-scale processes in single and multiple cells from the theoretical physics perspective. The course will be based on case studies from the fields of photosynthesis, vision, signaling, motion, morphogenesis, and neural information processing. Physical concepts, mathematical techniques, and computational methods required in cellular and multi-cellular biophysics will be introduced. Emphasis will be on the multi-scale organization and multi-level mechanisms of integral facilities of living systems. The latter mechanisms link various domains of physics, like classical and quantum mechanics, stochastic processes, self-organization, networks, and non-linear dynamics. The course will view biological systems as information processing devices and combine a top-down (whole organism, genomics) with a bottom-up (molecular) description.

This course is for students interested in the physics of biomolecular systems, biological organization and information processing. For physics graduate students that specialize in biological physics this is an essential course. Other students will benefit from an introduction to systems with emergent behavior that the course provides