Emre Alca

I am a Ph.D student in the physics department of the University of Pennsylvania. I am interested in natural algorithms and physical networks.

I am currently supervised by Prof. Andrea Liu (Penn), Dr. Reza Farhadifar (Flatiron Institute) and Dr. Michael Shelley (Flatiron Institute). We are studying the information processing capabilities of the mitotic spindle, especially in how it finds adaptive solutions to spatial positioning problems. I am especially interested in how adaptive biological networks might hold insights into more efficient methods for solving hard optimization problems.

From 2024-2025, I was a research associate with Prof. Jeremy Gunawardena at Harvard Medical School where we studied the role of energy expenditure in kinetic proofreading outside of steady state. Before that I was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto (class of 2023), where I worked with Prof. Alan Aspuru-Guzik (Toronto) and Prof. Erik Winfree (Caltech) on molecular computing.

My CV can be found here