Biography

Dr. Hong Qian earned his bachelor's degree in Astrophysics from Peking University, followed by a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Washington University in St. Louis. During his doctoral studies, he combined theoretical, experimental, and data analytic approaches to investigate single molecule biophysics, specifically focusing on Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) and Single-Particle Tracking (SPT). As a postdoctoral researcher, he conducted studies on the thermodynamics and kinetics of protein folding at the University of Oregon and the California Institute of Technology.

After a three-year stint in the Department of Biomathematics at the UCLA School of Medicine, Dr. Qian joined the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1997, with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Bioengineering at the university’s School of Medicine.  He progressed through the academic ranks as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor, and was appointed as the Olga Jung Wan Endowed Professor. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Additionally, Dr. Qian has served associate editor of several journals published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and has been members of the editorial committees of multiple journals in the fields of biophysical chemistry, systems biology, and quantitative biology. In 2011, he co-founded the Gordon Research Conference on Stochastic Physics in Biology with Professor Ken A. Dill. He joined Westlake University in October, 2025, and is currently a Chair Professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS).

Research

Dr. Hong Qian has a broad interests and his research spans a wide range of areas.  His doctoral and postdoctoral work on “single-molecule fluctuations” and the “physical chemistry of proteins” continues to be widely cited in related laboratory research. In his early career, his research focused on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and he pioneered the application of this theory to molecular motors, as well as various biochemical processes such as metabolism, transcription, and signal transduction, in living cells. 

On the theoretical front, Dr. Qian skillfully integrated the mathematics of stochastic processes with non-equilibrium physics, applying them to the mathematical modeling of complex biological systems. He introduced several mathematically supported new concepts, laying a solid applied mathematics foundation for a unified theoretical biology framework. These research results became the monograph “Stochastic Chemical Reaction Systems in Biology”, published by Springer Nature in 2021.

In recent years, Dr. Qian's research direction has shifted toward the theoretical foundations of statistical thermodynamics within the realm of theoretical physics. Together with collaborators in theoretical physics, he has revisited the century-old Gibbs statistical thermodynamics theory. In this process, they discovered that this classical theory is highly relevant to the currently prominent, yet not fully mature, field of data science.

Representative Publications

• Beard, D.A. and Qian, H. Chemical Biophysics: Quantitative Analysis of Cellular Systems, Cambridge University Press (2008).

• 葛颢，钱紘，数学动力学模型。北京大学现代数学丛书，北京大学出版社（2017）。

• Qian, H. and Ge, H. Stochastic Chemical Reaction Systems in Biology, Springer Lecture Notes on Mathematical Modelling in the Life Sciences, Springer (2021).

1. Jia, C., Qian, H. and Zhang, M.Q. (2024) Analytic theory of stochastic oscillations in single-cell gene expression. SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, 84, 1204-1226 (2024).

2. Lu, Z. and Qian, H. Emergence and breaking of duality symmetry in generalized fundamental thermodynamic relations. Physical Review Letters, 128, 150603 (2022).

3. Berger, A., Qian, H., Wang, S. and Yi, Y. Intermittent synchronization in finite-state random networks under Markov perturbations. Communications in Mathematical Physics, 384, 1945-1970. (2021).

4. Qian, H. and Kou, S.C. Statistics and related topics in single-molecule biophysics. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 1, 465-492 (2014).

5. Qian, H. Cooperativity in cellular biochemical processes: Noise-enhanced sensitivity, fluctuating enzyme, bistability with nonlinear feedback, and other mechanisms for sigmoidal responses. Annual Review of Biophysics, 41, 179-204 (2012).

6. Cooper, J.A. and Qian, H.  A mechanism for Src kinase-dependent signaling by noncatalytic receptors. Biochemistry, 47, 5681-5688 (2008).

7. Qian, H. Phosphorylation energy hypothesis: open chemical systems and their biological functions. Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, 58, 113-142 (2007).

8. Kim, K.H. and Qian, H. Entropy production of Brownian macromolecules with inertia. Physical Review Letters, 93, 120602 (2004).

9. Beard, D.A., Liang, S.-D., and Qian, H. Energy balance for analysis of complex metabolic network. Biophysical Journal, 83, 79-86 (2002).

10. Qian, H. and Murray, J.D. A simple method of parameter space determination for diffusion-driven instability with three species. Applied Mathematics Letters, 14, 405-411 (2001).

11. Doyle, R., Simons, K., Qian, H., and Baker, D. Local interaction and the optimization of protein folding. Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics, 29, 282-291 (1997).

12. Qian, H. and Hopfield, J.J. Entropy-enthalpy compensation: Perturbation and relaxation in thermodynamic systems. Journal of Chemical Physics, 105, 9292-9298 (1996).

13. Qian, H. and Schellman, J.A. Helix-coil theories: A comparative study for finite length polypeptides. Journal of Physical Chemistry, 96, 3987-3994 (1992).

14. Scholtz, J.M., Qian, H., York, E.J., Stewart, J.M., and Baldwin, R.L. Parameters of helix-coil transition theory for alanine-based peptides of varying chain lengths in water. Biopolymers, 31, 1463-1470 (1991).

15. Qian, H., Sheetz, M.P., and Elson, E.L. Single particle tracking: Analysis of diffusion and flow in two dimensional systems. Biophysical Journal, 60, 910-921 (1991).

16. Qian, H. and Elson, E.L. Distribution of molecular aggregation by analysis of fluctuation moments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 87, 5479-5483 (1990).

Contact Us

Email：qianhong@westlake.edu.cn