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May 25, 2013 By

We’ve all been busy this spring writing grants and teaching courses and doing research and graduating(!), so lots of publications snuck by that we didn’t comment on. Here’s a few I think that might be interesting to our readers.

  • From Chris Miller‘s lab, bacterial antiporters do act as “virtual proton efflux pumps”:
  • nsrv2Are ninja stars responsible for controlling actin disassembly? Seems like the Goode lab might think so.
    • Chaudhry F, Breitsprecher D, Little K, Sharov G, Sokolova O, Goode BL. Srv2/cyclase-associated protein forms hexameric shurikens that directly catalyze actin filament severing by cofilin. Mol Biol Cell. 2013;24(1):31-41.
  • What do you get from statistical mechanics of self-propelled particles? The Hagan and Baskaran groups team up to find out.
  • From John Lisman and Ole Jensen (PhD ’98), thoughts about what the theta and gamma rhythms in the brain encode
  • From Mike Marr‘s lab, studeies using genome-wide nascent sequencing to understand how transcrption bursting is controlled in eukaryotic cells
  • From the Lau and Sengupta labs, RNAi pathways contribute to long term plasticity in worms that have gone through the Dauer stage
    • Hall SE, Chirn GW, Lau NC, Sengupta P. RNAi pathways contribute to developmental history-dependent phenotypic plasticity in C. elegans. RNA. 2013;19(3):306-19.
  • Can nanofibers selectively disrupt cancer cell types? Early results from Bing Xu‘s group.
    • Kuang Y, Xu B. Disruption of the Dynamics of Microtubules and Selective Inhibition of Glioblastoma Cells by Nanofibers of Small Hydrophobic Molecules. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2013.

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Baskaran Wins NSF-CAREER award to pursue research on active fluids

July 20, 2012 By

Dr. Aparna Baskaran of the Physics Department has been awarded the prestigious CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation that is a highly competitive development grant for early career tenure track faculty members. This grant will fund the research ongoing in Dr. Baskaran’s group on dynamics in active materials. Active materials are a novel class of complex fluids that are driven out of equilibrium at the level of individual entities. Examples of such systems include bacterial suspensions, cytoskeletal filaments interacting with motor proteins and inanimate systems such as self-propelled phoretic colloidal particles. The theoretical challenge in understanding these systems lies in the fact that, unlike traditional materials, we no longer have the scaffold of equilibrium on which to base the theoretical framework.  At the practical front, these materials exhibit novel properties not seen in regular materials.  Further, they form the physical framework of biological systems  in that regulatory mechanisms modulate the mechanical properties of this material in response to environmental stimuli.  Dr. Baskaran’s research in this field will be done in collaboration with the groups of Dr. Michael Hagan, Dr. Zvonimir Dogic and Dr. Bulbul Chakraborty. It will enhance and complement the MRSEC research activities in the active materials thrust.

Figure Caption : Videos of example systems for active materials. A) A fish school exhibiting complex collective swimming. B) Swarming at the edge of an E. Coli Bacterial Colony. C) Cytoplasmic streaming inside the yolk of a fertilized cell.

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Six scientists secure fellowships

May 9, 2012 By

One current undergraduate, and five alumni, from the Brandeis Sciences were honored with offers of National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships in 2012. The fellowships, which are awarded based on a national competition, provide three full years of support for Ph.D. research and are highly valued by students and institutions. These students are:

  • Samuel McCandlish ’12 (Physics) , a current student who did research with Michael Hagan and Aparna Baskaran, resulting in a paper “Spontaneous segregation of self-propelled particles with different motilities” in Soft Matter (as a junior). He then switched to work with Albion Lawrence for his senior thesis research. Sam will speak about “Bending and Breaking Time Contours: a World Line Approach to Quantum Field Theory” at the Berko Symposium on May 14.  Sam has been offered a couple of other fellowships as well, so he’ll have a nice choice to make. Sam will be heading to Stanford in the fall to continue his studies in theoretical physics.
  • Briana Abrahms ’08 (Physics). After graduating from Brandeis, Briana followed her interests in ecological and conversation issues, and  in Africa as a research assistant with the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, Briana previously described some of her experiences here in “Three Leopards and a Shower“. Briana plans to pursue as Ph.D. in Ecology at UC Davis.
  • Sarah Robinson ’07 (Chemistry). Sarah did undergraduate research with Irving Epstein on “Pattern formation in a coupled layer reaction-diffusion system”. After graduating, Sarah spent time with the Peace Corps in Tanzania, returning to study Neurosciene at UCSF.
  • Si Hui Pan ’10 (Physics) participated in a summer REU program at Harvard, and continued doing her honors thesis in collaboration with the labs at Harvard. Her award is to study condensed matter physics at MIT.
  • Elizabeth Setren ’10 was a Mathematics and Economics double major who worked together with Donald Shepard (Heller School) on the cost of hunger in the US. She has worked as an Assistant Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and her award is to study Economics at Harvard.
  • Michael Ari Cohen ’01 (Psychology) worked as a technology specialist for several years before returning to academia as  PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.

Congratulations to all the winners!

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Brandeis in Aspen II: Physics of granular materials

July 1, 2011 By

This post is a companion to Brandeis in Aspen I, and describes a workshop attended by Bulbul Chakraborty and Aparna Baskaran at the Aspen Center for Physics. The format of Aspen workshops is different from the usual academic workshop.  Each day has just one or two talks, which are primarily self-organized on a volunteer basis among the participants.  The format is designed to encourage  physicists working in a particular area to share research findings and enable cross-pollination of ideas in an informal and loosely structured setting.

The workshop attended by Chakraborty and Baskaran was entitled “Fluctuation and Response in granular materials”. Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry. Examples range from sand and other geological materials, food and consumer products, and pebble beds in nuclear reactors. Understanding and controlling the properties of granular materials impacts such diverse processes as oil recovery, nuclear pebble bed reactors, printing and copying, and pharmaceutical processing. Granular media pose difficult and unique scientific challenges that distinguish them from atomic, nano-scale, and colloidal materials. Being intrinsically out of thermal equilibrium, assemblies of grains readily become trapped in metastable states, are extremely sensitive to preparation conditions, and can have strongly time-dependent properties.  Relaxing the constraints of thermal equilibrium, however, offers an advantage by opening up possibilities for creating novel static and dynamic phases that have distinctive functional properties.

At Aspen, the one-on-one and small sub group interactions among the participants covered a wide range of topics that are at the forefront of materials research, however, the program as a whole primarily focused on two questions. The first question was: What do we understand about jamming of granular materials? Jamming is what occurs in everyday life when we are trying to get coffee beans out of a hopper and they suddenly stop flowing. We fix this by tapping on the hopper. But this same phenomenon when it happens in giant grain silos causes them to collapse. So, one of the challenges is to be able to predict jamming events. The role of the physicist here is to design and carry out experiments in minimal model systems and develop theoretical frameworks that lead to predictive models of observed phenomena. Statistical Mechanics provides a powerful theoretical tool to address this question and our own Professor Chakraborty is one of the leading experts in the theory of jamming. The participants at the workshop had several robust discussions on the current understanding of this phenomenon and theoretical and experimental challenges that remain to be addressed.

The second question that the workshop focused on was : How does a dense granular material behave when sheared? Granular materials are called rheological fluids in that they exhibit shear-thinning and shear thickening behavior. In everyday life, we are all familiar with shear thinning. When we squeeze a tube of toothpaste, we are shearing it and it flows onto our brush. But once on the brush it stays put. This behavior is called shear thinning. Understanding rheology of granular materials is important for diverse applications ranging from pharmaceutical processes to being able to print well. The participants discussed in detail the physics of sheared granular materials and shared insight obtained from theory, simulations and experiments.

All participants departed the workshop invigorated by the robust exchange of ideas, ready to address the challenges presented by these complex materials.

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Physics Department welcomes new faculty member Aparna Baskaran

September 1, 2010 By

The physics department welcomes its newest faculty member, Professor Aparna Baskaran. Professor Baskaran is a theorist who studies non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and its biophysical applications.

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