Jul 19, 2021: Amirali Hossein successfully defended his thesis on “Investigation of Mechanical Properties of Asymmetric Lipid Bilayers via Coarse-Grained Simulation.” We are all excited that his important work over the past few years has come to a great conclusion. In August he will take up a postdoctoral position at the NIH, and we’re excited to see what he will continue to work on!

Jun 12, 2021: We are incredibly excited to announce that Fangwei Si will soon be joining the Biophysics Group as an Assistant Professor. Fangwei works in the exciting field of bacterial physiology. He has done important work on cell-size control, and is also deeply interested in explore fundamental principles and mechanisms of cellular organizations. Fangwei will be joining us physically in June 2022, but he’s already started setting up a lab at Carnegie Mellon.

Nov 30, 2020: Markus Deserno has been awarded the 2021 Thomas E. Thompson Award from the Biophysical Society‘s Membrane Structure and Function Subgroup for his use of theory and simple models to discover fundamental properties of membranes and his unique ability to connect abstract theoretical concepts to real-life functional processes. For more, see this short CMU press announcement!

Sept 24, 2020: One of the most important processes in cell development is cell division. In a joint project led by Prof. Dr. Robert Grosse in Freiburg, Germany, the Endesfelder lab was now part of the research team that discovered that bundled fibers of actin within a cell nucleus play an important role in how cells enlarge after division: After division, cell nuclei must grow in order to reorganize and unpack the genetic information to process and read it. With this work, the team shows that bundled fibers of actin – which are normally responsible for exerting force – work within the cell to expand the cell nucleus. The results are now published in EMBO reports.

July 28, 2020: Our soon-to-be-arriving new biophysics faculty Ulrike Endesfelder, together with her colleagues Dirk Pflüger and Timo de Wolff, has published a Correspondence to nature: “#StopPandemicBias: scientists, share your privilege“.
The goal is to raise awareness in the multiple ways the current Pandemic creates vastly different challenges for different people, and it behooves us all to combat the resulting biases and undeserved privileges.

July 17, 2020: Yi-Heng Zhang (张一恒), Markus Deserno, and Zhan-Chun Tu (涂展春) publish a paper on the “Dynamics of active nematic defects on the surface of a sphere” in Phys. Rev. E 102, 012607 (2020).

July 9, 2020: Jake Cornwall Scoones, Deb Sankar Banerjee, and Shiladitya Banerjee have just published a Perspective on “Size-Regulated Symmetry Breaking in Reaction-Diffusion Models of Developmental Transitions” in Cells 9(7), 1646 (2020).

July 8, 2020: Ilijana and Alex from the Endesfelder group made it safely to Pittsburgh! Welcome!

June 3, 2020: Markus Deserno has given an online talk in the YouTube seminar series organized by Erdinç Sezgin, about “Spontaneous Curvature, Differential Stress, and Bending Modulus of Asymmetric Lipid Membranes“. You can still watch it here.

April 28, 2020: It is Dr. Brad Treece now! Many congratulations for successfully defending your thesis on “Experimentally Biased Molecular Dynamics Simulations Using Neutron Reflection Data“!

April 8, 2020: Brad’s paper on “Steering Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Membrane-Associated Proteins with Neutron Reflection Results” has appeared in J. Chem. Theory Comput. 16(5), 3408–3419 (2020).

February 4, 2020: Amirali’s paper on “Spontaneous Curvature, Differential Stress, and Bending Modulus of Asymmetric Lipid Membranes” has appeared in Biophys. J. 118(3), 624–642 (2020). Check out the accompanying New and Notable “Differential or Curvature Stress? Modus Vivendi” by Ed Lyman and Alex Sodt, if you want a quick run-down of the key results!