Discipline: Engineering - Chemical or Biological

Our research focuses on understanding how soft materials deform, organize, and respond to their environments—particularly far from equilibrium—using single-molecule techniques and materials discovery. Current research topics include understanding the dynamics of lipid vesicles and membranes, colloidal and capillary suspensions, and entangled polymers in flow, as well as AI-guided closed-loop discovery of organic photocatalysts and light-harvesting … Continued

Our group specializes in using engineered tissues and computational models to understand how mechanical forces direct developmental patterning events during tissue morphogenesis and during disease progression. We are specifically focused on uncovering key insights into how tissues build themselves and how mechanical forces induce cancer progression.

My research group aims to develop protein therapeutics to treat and vaccines to prevent infectious diseases, using a combination of biological and engineering principles. This work primarily focuses on design of proteins, using evolutionary, structural and computational apporaches. The antibody which served as the focus of my doctoral work was subsequently licensed and developed as … Continued

DNA sequencing by synthesis (SBS) during polymerase reaction offers a robust platform to decipher DNA sequences. My group is pursuing the research and development of several SBS approaches using molecular engineering for applications in precision medicine. In one SBS method, 4 nucleotides (A, C, G, T) are modified as nucleotide reversible terminators (NRT) by attaching … Continued

I work at the interface between physical/engineering modeling and data science; in particular, my work links manifold learning/machine learning tools with established scientific computing tools/numerical analysis. This work extends the “equation free, variable free” modeling introduced around 2000. I am also very much interested in applications of this data driven technology to engineering and biomedical … Continued

Changes in cellular behavior underlie development, disease, and tissue homeostasis. The response of cells to external factors depends upon posttranslational signals and changes in gene expression. These biomolecules are wired together in cells to form networks. Intracellular signaling and gene-expression networks are highly interconnected and time dependent, making them difficult to study and even harder … Continued

Our research aims to develop cell-free biology as an enabling technology for biomanufacturing life-saving therapeutics, advanced materials, and sustainable chemicals, both quickly and on-demand. Specifically, we focus on designing, constructing, and modifying biological systems involved in protein synthesis and metabolism, with promise to advance new paradigms for synthetic biology.

Our research focuses on the synthesis, characterization, engineering, and simulation of nanostructured materials and systems for photonics, energy, and chemical conversion applications. Our goal is to understand how size, morphology, organization, and surface structure affect the physicochemical properties and behavior of materials over different length, time, and energy scales. Current research topics include: (1) III-nitride … Continued

Small molecules from microbes are used widely in the clinic as antibiotics, anticancer agents, immunosuppressants, and cholesterol-lowering drugs. Our lab focuses on three emerging principles that are changing our understanding of which microbes make natural products, what roles they play in the biology of their producers, and how best to discover them: 1. Small molecules … Continued

My group studies enantioselective chemistry occurring on naturally chiral metal surfaces. These are high Miller index, single-crystalline metal surfaces with no mirror symmetry and, therefore, existing as two enantiomorphs. We first demonstrated that such surfaces are chiral and then that they interact enantiospecifically with chiral adsorbed molecules. These interactions are the basis for enantioselective separations … Continued