 Hello, I am Mithun Mithra. I am an associate professor here at the Department of Physics at IIT Bombay. So, what I will try to do is I will give you a very brief introduction to the motivation behind this course, the Physics of Biological Systems. Traditionally you know we might think of physics and biology as being very disparate disciplines. However, what has become very clear over the past few decades is that if you are to obtain a holistic and integrated understanding of biological systems, we must consider the role of physical forces in their formation, their structure, their functioning and so on. And what is brought about this change is an explosion of new quantitative experiments in biology, which has yielded a wealth of data that we can now model using lessons that we learned in physics in order to gain an understanding about these biological systems. So, this is a theoretical course and we will be talking about theoretical methods, but in the background in the back of our mind we will always have these data from experiments in mind and we will try to model these data so that we can come up with a better understanding of biological systems. This is not a very new thought. In fact, in the 1940s Schrodinger, who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics stated that one of the fundamental questions that we must try to understand is how physical and chemical reactions that take place within the boundaries of a spatially conf, within a spatially confined boundary like a cell can give rise to life itself. So, in this course what I will try to do is I will try to attempt to give an understanding of how physical forces can shape our understanding of biological systems. We will look at processes that you might be familiar with like diffusion, we will look at how life looks at the low Reynolds number environments, how energy, free energy, entropy, all of these physics concepts play a role in biology. One of the distinguishing features if you think about it of life itself is that it is a non-equilibrium system. As somebody once said, if you are in equilibrium, you are dead. We need a constant input of energy for life to sustain itself. So, one of the aspects that we will consider is when equilibrium models are sufficient to model some biological phenomenon and when we must consider non-equilibrium effects. Just to give a different background, so this course runs in IIT Bombay as an elective course. It is an elective theoretical course, it is meant for graduate students as well as for interested undergraduate students from physics as well as from engineering disciplines. What I ask is that you have, it would be helpful if you have some sort of a basic understanding of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics concepts like energy, free energy, entropy and so on. The rest we will sort of try to build up as we go along in the course itself. So, hopefully if you attend this course what you will come away with is an introduction to this very fascinating and this very interdisciplinary and emerging field of physical quantitative biology. You will hopefully come away with an understanding of what the issues are, how to model biological systems, how to write down equations that will capture the essential physical phenomenon and how to solve these equations in order to gain a holistic understanding of the biological system that you are interested in. So, hopefully you will have, if you choose to attend this course, you will have a very enjoyable time of it. Thank you.