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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Student, 2017
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Aaron Hall, REU student
Aaron Hall joined as a senior physics major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during the summer of 2017. He developed computer simulations of the dendritic actin network that forms at the leading edge of motile cells. This was a three-dimensional stochastic model in which actin filaments could grow, sever, shrink, branch and bend when hitting the cell membrane. Aaron used the model to study the dependence of the actin network parameters (such as filament orientation, concentration) on the underlying mechanisms and compared them to prior experimental data from electron microscopy.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Student, 2016
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Vedant Sachdeva, REU student
Vedant Sachdeva joined as a senior physics major at Rutgers in summer, 2016. Vedant worked on analytical and numerical solutions of a partial differential equation model describing distributed actin polymerization at the leading edge of motile cells. Using physically motivated boundary conditions at the leading edge, he calculated and classified the steady states that correspond to concentration profiles of actin and regulators.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Student, 2015
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James Tilley, REU student
James Tilley joined as a senior physics major at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst during the summer of 2015. Under the supervision of graduate student Laura McMillen, he studied how actin filaments are distributed spatially and temporally in the lamellipodium, a branched filament network involved in cell motion. He used an existing Monte Carlo simulation of a lamellipodium to model actin photoactivation. He also programmed an Euler-based finite difference algorithm in Java to find a stable steady-state solution to equations governing the evolution of the distribution of filaments, filament endpoints, and junctions.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Student, 2014
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Anna Henderson, REU student
Anna Henderson joined as a senior at the Keck Science Department of Scripps College. During the summer of 2014 she used SOAX, a filament network extraction software to measure the location and intensity of actin filaments in fission yeast cells in the process of contractile ring assembly. The images were provided by the group of Jian-Qiu Wu at the Ohio State University. This method allowed for a more detailed comparison of actin filament networks in live cells with a three-dimensional model developed by Tamara Bidone and Haosu Tang in the Vavylonis group.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Student, 2013
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Daniel Hurwitz, REU student
Daniel Hurwitz joined as a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a B.S. in Biophysics. During the summer of 2013, he assisted with a project to elucidate the process of mate selection through pheromone secretion in fission yeast. Programming in Java, he created a dynamic model of mate selection in fission yeast that indicates the importance of mate exploration. Specifically, higher rates of exploration were shown to result in more optimally paired configurations among the population. His work was aided by experimental data from the group of Sophie Martin at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His contribution was reported in a paper published in Current Biology (2016) in which he is a co-author.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Student, 2012
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Spencer B. Mamer
REU student
Spencer Mamer joined as a student at St. John's University, majoring in Physics and minoring in Chemistry and Classics. During the summer of 2012, he developed a program in Java and Open Source Physics to simulate the behavior of actin filaments at the cell tips of a fission yeast cells to study what processes may be significant in the assembly of actin cables. He determined a range of cross-linking parameter values which produced the morphologies observed in living cells and how that range changes with variations of other biological parameters.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Students, 2011
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Thienbao Nguyen
REU student
Thienbao Nguyen joined as a student at the University of Denver studying physics and mathematics. During the summer, she developed a computer program that simulates fission yeast length and birth scar distributions. She compared her results to measurements of cell images from collaborators at the University of Miami.
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Jialei Zhu, REU student
Jialei Zhu joined as a student at Brown University. During the summer of 2011, she studied the kinetics of single actin filament polymerization by image analysis and numerical simulations. After fitting her analytical and simulation results to experimental data, she estimated the values of rate constants of actin filament depolymerization.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Students, 2010
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Heather Petroccia, REU student
Heather M. Petroccia joined as a student at Villanova University, where she obtained a major in Physics and a minor in Mathematics. During the summer of 2010, she programmed in Java and OpenSourcePhysics to create a computational model of protrusion and retraction along the leading edge of motile cells. This model allowed for a better understanding of how filamentous actin and other mechanisms are involved with cell motility. She contributed to a paper published in Biophysical Journal (2012) in which she is a co-author.
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Research Experiences for Undergraduates Students, 2009
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Heidi Moreira, REU student
Heidi B. Moreira joined as a student at Rutgers University, majoring in Astrophysics. In her project she analyzed fission yeast cells during the last stage of mitosis, when a ring is formed by myosin nodes that splits the cell in two daughter cells. Using data from the lab of Jian-Qiu Wu (The Ohio State University), over the course of the summer she quantified how the broad band of nodes in the middle of the cell are uniform when coalescing to form the contractile ring. The results of the research correspond to one of the theories given to how this process is done.
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