JEFF GORE, Assistant Professor of Physics
As of January 2010

Email: gore@mit.edu Phone: 617.715.4251 Address: MIT Department of Physics Building 13-2008 Cambridge, MA 02139 Related Links: Gore Laboratory Jeff Gore's Home Page Biophysics Seminar Series Area of Physics: Biophysics

Research Interests

Jeff Gore uses microbes such as yeast and bacteria to experimentally probe fundamental theories in evolutionary dynamics, systems biology, and quantitative ecology.

As a Pappalardo Fellow working together with Alexander van Oudenaarden, Jeff used sucrose metabolism in yeast as a model system to study the evolution of cooperation. The conditions required for the initiation and maintenance of cooperative behaviors is a classic problem in evolutionary biology. How can cooperators survive when they can be taken advantage of by "cheaters"? In the case of sucrose metabolism, Jeff found that cooperators can survive even in the presence of cheaters because the cooperators capture a small fraction (~1%) of the sugar they create before it is shared, thus making the interaction what game theorists call a snowdrift game.

Biographical Sketch

Jeff joins the MIT Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in January 2010, after spending the previous three years in the Department as a Pappalardo Fellow. He received his PhD from the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. His graduate research in single-molecule biophysics was done in the laboratory of Carlos Bustamante, focusing on the study of twist and torque in single molecules of DNA. Jeff is excited to be starting in the Physics Department at MIT, particularly because he received his undergraduate degree from the Department in 1999.

Selected Publications