Joint seminar of the QuantiXLie Center of Excellence, the Croatian Biophysical Society and the Department of Physics

First-passage phenomena are ubiquitous in physics and biology. They represent processes where a certain condition (e.g. passage of a barrier, escape from a trap, cell division) is fulfilled at a time that depends on the fluctuating dynamics of the system of interest. In this talk I will introduce the notion of first-passage and stopping times of stochastic processes and discuss applications of first-passage ideas to physics and biology. In particular I will discuss a novel model describing the erratic motion of RNA polymerases during backtracking states with first-passage times representing the recovery time prior to resume elongation. The talk will continue with an appetizer of the most recent results of my group on the study of first-passage-time fingerprints of water diffusion near glutamine crystals.