The group collaborates with a wide range of researchers including at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA), Utrecht University (Netherlands), Harvard University (USA), Leipzig University (Germany), Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), and Indiana University (USA). The group is part of the biophysics effort which includes the group of Jaan Mannik at the University of Tennessee (http://www.phys.utk.edu/research/soft-matter.html)
Undergraduate Students
Aidan Desilets - Aidan is a WSU student working on understanding how the extracellular matrix influences breast cancer tumor growth. He is building lattice models and using cancer imaging data to inform his simulations.
Ioanna Tchangova - Ioanna is a WSU student working on modelling cancer growth. She is currently collaborating with Aidan to understand how the extracellular matrix influences breast cancer tumor growth. She will also be looking into adding cell motility to her simulations to see how motility versus cellular growth influences cancer cell survival. We are always looking for undergraduate researchers!
Research Associates
Dima Bolmatov - Dima is a research assistant professor at UT and works
on understanding the structure and function of heterogeneities in
biological membranes. He uses scattering techniques including elastic
and inelastic neutron and X-ray scattering. He is an expert in using
solid state approaches to understand fundamental aspects of soft
materials. (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4179-8971)
Graduate Students
Mu-Hung Chang - Mu-Hung works on understanding the formation and
structure of the bacterial nucleoid and the general organization of the
internal components of the bacterial cell. Mu-Hung uses ideas from the
physics of polymers and liquid-liquid phase separation to describe the
effects of crowding and DNA compaction. Mu-hung works in close
collaboration with the Mannik group (http://www.phys.utk.edu/jmannik/LCBHome.html).
Nora Bauer - Nora works on modelling the motion of domain walls in ferroelectric materials. She studies the effects of both thermal and spatially quenched disorder on the velocity and shape of the domain wall. Her modelling uses a free energy approach from which she extracts a stochastic partial differential equation for the local polarization in the material. Nora is particularly interested in how noise influences materials with many metastable states (i.e., "multiple potential wells" in the free energy).
Alumni
Dominique Odens (Summer 2022) - undergraduate summer research intern. Dominique works on random walk
models for understanding molecular motion within biological membranes.
Clara Castillo (2018-2021) - graduate student, now postdoc at UTK
Adam Bryant (2018-2021) - undergraduate researcher, now engineer in Colorado
Christal Martin (2018-2020) - undergraduate researcher, honors thesis, now graduate student at UTK
Immanuel Schmidt (2021-2022) - undergraduate researcher, honors thesis, now graduate student at UIUC
Charles Ladd (2018) - undergraduate summer research intern
Mary Kemp (2017) - undergraduate researcher