Terry Hwa Presidential Chair II, Professor

Terry Hwa is a Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in the Department of Physics, with joint appointment in the Section of Molecular Biology, Division of Biological Sciences. He received his B.Sc. from Stanford University, majoring in Physics, Biology, and Electrical Engineering, and Ph.D. from MIT with a thesis in theoretical and experimental physics. He joined the physics faculty at UCSD in 1995 and launched a microbiology biology wet-lab in the early 2000s, developing over time a uniquely quantitative approach to studying bacterial physiology. Terry initiated the Quantitative Biology Ph.D. Specialization Program at UCSD and is its director. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Terry entered biology initially to study genomics, biomolecular interactions, and combinatorial gene regulation. He subsequently launched a microbiology wet lab and developed a uniquely quantitative approach to study bacterial physiology. In the 2010s, the Hwa lab established a number of bacterial growth laws and formulated a principle of proteomic resource allocation. This line of studies culminated in a theory of bacterial growth control, quantitatively predicting bacterial behaviors and gene expression for a variety of environmental and genetic perturbations, elucidating a number of long-standing mysteries in microbiology. The Hwa lab is continuing to extend its physiological approach to characterize bacterial species singly and in the consortium, uncover underlying principles governing the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities, and apply these principles to synthetic biology applications.