Dr. Arkin is associate professor of bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley, adjunct professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California in San Francisco, faculty scientist in the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and director of the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival. He is also an assistant investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and pursued postdoctoral studies at Stanford University in chemistry with John Ross and in developmental biology with Harley McAdams and Lucy Shapiro.

He is interested in the evolutionary design principles of cellular regulatory networks and how these principles aid in the prediction, control and design of cellular behaviors. His lab develops physical theory and computational tools for understanding cellular processes such as gene expression, signal transduction cascades and cytomechanics. The lab analyzes genomic data relevant to the dynamics of regulatory networks in a number of viral, bacterial and eukaryotic systems, and performs experiments to test the theories. The lab is also involved in synthetic biological work in designing cellular circuits and systems for pure and applied purposes.