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Paul HiggsProfessor Department of Physics and Astronomy Office: ABB 345 Phone: (905) 525-9140
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Brief CV
From 2002 : Canada Research Chair in Biophysics at McMaster (Joint appointment between Physics and Biochemistry departments).
1995-2002 : Lecturer in Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester School of Biological Sciences, UK.
1992-1995 : Royal Society Sorby Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK.
1989-1992 : Post-docs in France at the Service de Physique Théorique (CEA, Saclay) and the Institut Charles Sadron (CNRS, Strasbourg).
1986-1989 : PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK.
Research Interests
I started out as a statistical physicist working on polymers and soft condensed matter. I became interested in applications of statistical mechanics to biological problems. This led me to study RNA folding and various problems in population genetics and evolutionary biology. In recent years I have been working in bioinformatics and molecular evolution. For information on each of the following research areas, please follow the links below:
·
Molecular Evolution and
Phylogenetic Methods
·
The OGRe Database of
Mitochondrial Genomes
·
Food Webs and Ecological
Communities
·
Polymers and Soft
Condensed Matter
·
Population Genetics and
Mathematical Biology
Teaching
Together with Cecile Fradin, I am responsible for the Biophysics Specialization in the undergraduate physics program. Students on this specialization take Core Courses in Physics plus a range of courses from Biochemistry, Biology and Genetics. More details of the Biophysics Specialization here. We have also developed a range of New Courses specifically for the specialization.
Courses I Teach:
PHYSICS 4S03 - Molecular Biophysics
BIOCHEMISTRY 4Y03 - Computational Biology
SCIENCE 2B03 - The Big Questions Do you feel like going back to those big, sweeping questions that occur to everybody as children: Where did everything come from? What is life and how did it begin? What is in the whole universe? Did it have a beginning, and will it have an end? Is there life elsewhere? This is a non-specialist course open to students in all disciplines.