The European Summer School of the University of Strasbourg is a prestigious one-week meeting of students from all over Europe. They present their research projects and attend lectures on some of the most recent topics in physics presented by internationally known scientists. The 2016 edition of the school is organized by the faculty of physics and engineering of the University of Strasbourg together with the Collaborative Research Centre 1027 of the University of the Saarland.
Cell Physics has emerged as a new branch of Physics during the last decade. Quantitative experiments that address the cellular dynamics can nowadays be performed directly in the living cell, tissue or organism. This enables the investigation of biological systems using a typical physicist’s approach, including a tight interaction between models and experiments. Because living matter exhibits new, complex out-of-equilibrium properties, cell physics has received a lot of interest from theorists in terms of model building.
New aspects have been developed in biology, concerning topics such as collective effects, chirality, quantum biology, as well as the origin of life. We now witness the appearance of a new generation of scientists that are trained in Physics as well as in Biology, who know about theory as much as about experimental work. The recently created Cell Physics Master in Strasbourg University is based on this scientific direction. The scope of the school covers recent developments in cell physics with a central emphasis on their biological relevance.