"Professor Kondev describes the discovery of the random nature of cellular decision making and how this randomness forces a re-examination of some very basic ideas in biology. He explains the implications of these countless random decisions for our understanding of diseases, such as bacterial infections and cancer. Jané Kondev grew up in the former Yugoslavia and received his BSc in physics at the University of Belgrade. He moved to the United States and received his PhD in Physics at Cornell University in 1995. He then became a post-doctoral fellow in physics at Brown University, and then a member of the School of Mathematics at the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study, and a Lecturer in Physics at Princeton before joining the Physics department at Brandeis University in 2000. Dr. Kondev has received recognition for both his research and teaching, including an NSF CAREER Award and the Cottrell Scholar Award. He was also a 2007-2008 Fellow at the Radcliffe Inst for Advanced Study."