Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News
Fall 2025: Congratulations to Yizhou and Ziming, whose paper was awarded Best Paper Runner-Up at NeurIPS!
Summer 2024: Congratulations to Martina, Jiliang, and Clare, who recently accepted faculty positions.
2024: Congratulations to Jiliang for winning the DBIO dissertation prize from APS.
February 2023: The Physics of Living Systems Group moved to new space in Building 4!
October, 2022: Congratulations to Jiliang and team for their paper in Science (also see perspective).
January, 2021: Jeff was selected as one of the two inaugural Schmidt Science Polymaths.
October, 2020: Gabriel Popkin wrote an article covering our work in Quanta Magazine.
May 14, 2018: Jeff was featured on the MIT webpage!
May 1, 2018: Natalie Angier at the NY Times wrote "A Population That Pollutes Itself Into Extinction (and It’s Not Us)".
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The Gore Lab combines theory and experiment to probe the emergent dynamics in ecological communities and deep neural networks. Within microbial communities we are interested in alternative stables states, chaotic fluctuations, community assembly, cross-feeding, antibiotic resistance, and the emergence of "cheater" strategies. Within neural networks we are interested in neural scaling laws and learning dynamics on high-dimensional landscapes.
Gore Laboratory
Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Physics of Living Systems Group
77 Massachusetts Avenue, 4-332
Cambridge, MA 02139
Selected Papers
Spatiotemporal noise stabilizes unbounded diversity in strongly-competitive communities, Al-Hiyasat et al (2026)
Universal One-third Time Scaling in Learning Peaked Distributions, Liu et al, ICML, accepted (2026)
Superposition yields robust neural scaling, Liu et al, NeurIPS (2025)
Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities, Hu et al, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2025)
Cooperative growth in microbial communities is a driver of multistability, Lopes et al, Nature Comm (2024)
Warmer temperatures favor slower-growing bacteria in natural marine communities, Abreu*, Dal Bello* et al, Science Advances (2023)
Emergent phases of ecological diversity and dynamics mapped in microcosms, Hu et al, Science (2022)
Resource-diversity relationship is bacterial communities reflect the network structure of microbial metabolism, Dal Bello et al, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2022)
Strength of species interactions determines biodiversity and stability in microbial communities, Ratzke et al, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2020)
Community structure follows simple assembly rules in microbial microcosms, Friedman et al, Nature Ecology and Evolution (2017)
Generic indicators for loss of resilience before a tipping point leading to population collapse, Dai et al, Science (2012)
Snowdrift game dynamics and facultative cheating in yeast, Nature (2009)
GORElaboratory
Ecological Systems Biology
Former Group Members (now faculty)
Clare Abreu, NYU
Jiliang Hu, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory / Tsinghua
Alvaro Sanchez, Madrid
Sivan Pearl Mizrahi, Hebrew University
Kirill Korolev, Boston University
Jonathan Friedman, Hebrew University
Christoph Ratzke, Univ. of Tubingen
Alfonso Perez Escudero, Toulouse (CNRS)
Akshit Goyal, ICTS in Bangalore
Martina Dal Bello, Yale
Avihu Yona, Hebrew University
Nic Vega, Emory University
Lei Dai, Shenzhen (CAS)
Longzhi Tan, Stanford
Daniel Amor, ENS in Paris
Saurabh Gandhi, IIT Delhi
