Welcome to my website! I am a biophysicist and a composer of classical music who loves seeking musical inspiration from beautiful scientific and natural phenomena, and who is passionate about using music to communicate science to a broader public.
I am a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously a biophysics PhD student at Harvard University. My scientific research deals with proteins--molecules that perform nearly every function we associate with life, including growth, metabolism, and reproduction--and how they acquire their functional structures. Just as cars need a specific structure to be able to function, protein molecules, made up of amino acids that are chemically strung together, must "fold" up into a specific 3D structure to be able to perform their crucial tasks. Failure of proteins to fold correctly has been linked to numerous diseases including Alzheimer's and cancer. Thus, it is imperative that we better understand how proteins fold correctly under normal conditions, and why the folding goes awry in disease. This knowledge is also necessary to understand and predict evolution, including the emergence of new coronavirus variants and the development of optimized cancer chemotherapy/immunotherapy regimens to mitigate recurrence.
On this website you may find more information about my research, including publications, as well as recordings of my musical works. You are welcome to contact me if you have any thoughts, questions, or are interested in collaborating!
August 14, 2023: Amir's scientific and musical work is profiled in the Harvard Magazine!
July 7, 2023: Amir's latest article, investigating how a key protein that allows SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus causing Covid) attains its functional structure, is published in Biophysical Journal.
May 8, 2023: The recent premier of Amir's Hidden Whispers (see below for details) by the fantastic musicians of the Lindenbaum Festival Ensemble is profiled in JoongAng Daily, the English-language version of one of South Korea's most widely read newspapers! It's a good day for pop culture when science-inspired music and BTS share the entertainment section of a major newspaper!
April 29, 2023: Amir's newest composition, Hidden Whispers, to be premiered at Harvard's 2023 Arts First Festival in Sanders Theater! This piece is inspired by elephant infrasounds--sounds so low in pitch that we can't hear them, but which they do hear and use to communicate over long distances! A video of the performance can be found here.
January 13, 2023: Amir presents his research on the folding of the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) receptor binding domain--the key protein used by the coronavirus to enter our cells, and the one we're exposed to during vaccination--at the 2023 Berkeley Statistical Mechanics Meeting.
December 20, 2022: Amir is moving to the west coast to start his postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Professors Susan Marqusee and Carlos Bustamante! Super excited to do great science and experience California's world-renowned sunshine, food and nature!
November 30, 2022: Amir successfully defends his PhD thesis at Harvard University and is now officially Dr. Bitran! Thank you to all my friends and family for your wonderful support. You may watch my thesis defense presentation (accessible to a general public) here
November 12, 2022: Amir's work, Morphogens for string quartet receives a second performance in Cambridge, MA as part of the Solo(s) Together commissioning project run by the Celebrity Series of Boston. You can learn more about this project in this promotional video as well as this roundtable discussion that Amir took part in. Recordings of the concert are coming soon!
Press
Amir's work as part of the science-meets-music Muse-IC project featured in Nature
Amir's scientific and musical work is profiled in the Harvard Magazine