October 27, 2026: Pittsburgh Biophysics Day is coming up! This year's keynote speaker will be Cristina Marchetti, who will talk about "Active nematic solids and morphogenesis."

September 16, 2025: Pittsburgh Biophysics Day took place in the Mellon Institute, with keynote speaker Yuhai Tu giving a fantastic presentation on "Nonequilibrium thermodynamics in living systems: Towards answering Schrödinger's question."

June 14–19, 2026: Markus attended and presented at the Santa Fe workshop on "Biological Membranes and Membrane Proteins: Challenges for Theory and Experiment," organized probably for the last time by Greg Voth. As always, a fantastic meeting of state of the art membrane biophsyics!

June 18, 2026: Nate's paper on "Stochastic process description of lipid flip-flop" has appeared in the Journal of Chemical Physics today! A rather detailed description using a broad set of tools from stochastic processes to describe not just the evolution of averages, but also the associated noise. It also clarifies how lipid packing changes the situation. (Spoiler alert: potentially a lot!) AIP also wrote a beautiful accompanying SciLight about this!

June 9, 2026: Seamus' paper on "Topological Approach to Measuring the Gaussian Curvature Modulus of Lipid Membranes in Simulation" has appeared in Physical Review Letters today! We are very proud about this impressive piece of work, whose follow-up implications are alreday on the way. MCS has also written a lovely press release about it!

June 1, 2026: The Biophysics Group is extremely excited to announce that Carlos Floyd will be joining us as an Assistant Professor in January of 2027. Cal is currently an AI+Science postdoctoral fellow of the Data Science Institute and a fellow of the Chicago Center for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He is interested in how biological systems use chemistry to perform computations, thermodynamic principles underlying the mechanisms by which soft matter systems control their state and fate, and biophysical modeling across a wide range of scales.

February 21, 2026: Markus chaired the Subgroup Saturday Symposium of the Membrane Structure and Function (MSAF) Subgroup of the BPS. A memorable event, during which Fangwei also gave a presentation in which he asked "How do Bacterial Cells Manage the Membrane Space?"

April 16, 2025: Today Malavika Varma successfully defended her thesis on "Cholesterol Distribution and Raft-Like Phase Behavior in Asymmetric Lipid Membranes." This is an exciting moment which we proudly celebrate with her! We wish Malavika an exciting future at her upcoming PostDoc position with Aaron Dinner at the University of Chicago!

May 2, 2023: Sam Foley successfully defended his thesis on "Mechanics and Thermodynamics of Differentially Stressed Lipid Membranes: Theory and Coarse-Grained Simulation" We are happy at this wonderful moment and wish him good luck for his future PostDoc position in the group of Margaret Johnson at Johns Hopkins University!

August 4, 2022: Muhammed Ergüder successfully defended his thesis on "Algorithmic Improvements for Extracting Lipid Bilayer Elastic Moduli Height and Director Fluctuations" We congratulate Muhammed for this fantastic achievement and wish him all the best for his upcoming PostDoc position with Mark Gerstein at the Yale School of Medicine!

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!