Bruce Tidor is professor of biological engineering and computer science at MIT. He graduated summa cum laude with an AB in chemistry and physics from Harvard College in 1983, and then received a Marshall Scholar Award to study at Oxford University's Wolfson College, where he earned an MSc in biochemistry. He received his PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 1990 and moved to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he started his independent research as a Whitehead Fellow.

In 1994, he was appointed to the faculty at MIT. He serves as founding co-director of MIT’s Computational and Systems Biology Initiative and also founded the associated PhD program.

Dr. Tidor's research focuses on the analysis of complex biological systems at the molecular and cellular level. Using molecular modeling, theory, and computation, he explores the structure, function, and interactions of proteins and nucleic acids and the roles played by specific chemical groups in defining the stability and specificity of molecular interactions. Using cell-level models, his group is exploring the relationship between network structure and biological function. He is actively involved in applying knowledge from modeling studies to rational design.

Alexander van Oudenaarden is a professor of physics and biology at MIT. van Oudenaarden’s research focuses on how single cells use gene and protein networks to accurately process intra- and extracellular signals. His laboratory made pioneering contributions to understanding stochastic gene expression and systems biology at the single-cell level.

The current efforts in the van Oudenaarden group are focused on an integrated theoretical and experimental approach to understanding the role of stochastic gene expression during development and differentiation. His PhD research in the field of experimental solid-state physics was performed at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in 1998 (with highest honors) and received the Andries Miedema Award for best PhD research in the field of condensed-matter physics in the Netherlands.

From 1998 to 1999, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, collaborating with Dr. Steven Boxer and Dr. Julie Theriot. He joined the MIT faculty in January 2000. In 2001, he was named an Alfred Sloan Research Fellow and a Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering, and he received the NSF CAREER award. van Oudenaarden was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2004.

Since 2001, he has been teaching a graduate-level course in systems biology at MIT, for which he received the MIT School of Science Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2007. In 2008, van Oudenaarden was promoted to full professor and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. He is the director of the NIH/NCI-funded Physical Sciences–Oncology center at MIT.