CV / Biography
Pieter Rein ten Wolde has led the Biochemical Networks group at AMOLF in Amsterdam since 2003 and has served as head of the institute’s Infomatter Department since 2024. He has also been a professor at the Faculty of Science of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam since 2008. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1998, with a thesis on a numerical study of pathways for homogeneous nucleation, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley from 1999 – 2001.
Ten Wolde is theoretical biophysicist who combines analytical theory with innovative computational techniques to uncover general principles of biochemical networks. He has pioneered the application of information theory to cellular systems and was the first to quantify cellular information transmission via time-varying signals. He developed a theory that shows how cellular information transmission is fundamentally bounded by the cellular resources to build and operate these networks, protein copies, time, and energy. He also developed Path Weight Sampling (PWS), a computational technique that, for the first time, made it possible compute the information transmission rate exactly. More recently, he extended this technique to enable the exact computation of transfer entropies, TE-PWS.
His methodological contributions also extend to the spatial simulation of biochemical networks and the study of rare events. He developed Green’s Function Reaction Dynamics (GFRD), an exact and highly efficient technique to simulate biochemical networks at the particle level in time and space. Applying GFRD to one of the best characterized signalling pathways in biology, the MAPK pathway, he demonstrated that spatio-temporal correlations at the molecular scale can qualitatively change the macroscopic behaviour of the system at the cellular scale. He also developed one of the most widely used numerical techniques to study rare events in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems, Forward Flux Sampling (FFS).
Ten Wolde was awarded a VICI grant in 2008 and an ERC Advanced grant in 2020.
