Professors Arpita Upadhyaya and Jeffery Klauda appointed co-directors of the Biophysics Program

Simona Patange, a biophysics doctoral degree candidate and member of the NCI-UMD Partnership program, will be the graduate student speaker for the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences’ May Commencement Celebration. Patange’s advisors were Michelle Girvan (IPST/Physics/Biophysics), Daniel Larson and David Levens from the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI).




Milos Nikolic, UMD biophysics Ph.D. student and NCI-UMD Partnership student, and Giuliano Scarcelli, assistant professor in UMD's Fischell Department of Bioengineering, co-authored a paper with colleagues that was published on April 3, 2020, in the journal Small.

Chemical Physics Ph.D. Student Renjie Zhao was first-author on the paper "Response Theory for Static and Dynamic Solvation of Ionic and Dipolar Solutes in Water" with John Weeks, Distinguished University Professor of IPST. The paper was published in the Journal of Statistical Physics on February 17, 2020.

Mary Pitman, a Ph.D. student in chemistry and member of the NCI-UMD Partnership program, published a first-author paper "Minimal Cylinder Analysis Reveals the Mechanical Properties of Oncogenic Nucleosomes" with co-authors Yamini Dalal (NIH/NCI) and Garegin Papoian (Chemistry and Biochemistry/IPST). The paper was published online February 11, 2020, in Biophysical Journal. 

In August 2019, Associate Professor of Biology Daniel A. Butts and AMSC alumnus Matt Whiteway published the article "The quest for interpretable models of neural population activity," in Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 

Aravind Chandrasekaran, a chemistry Ph.D. student in the NCI-UMD Partnership program, published a first-author paper "Remarkable structural transformations of actin bundles are driven by their initial polarity, motor activity, crosslinking, and filament treadmilling" with co-authors Arpita Upadhyaya (Physics/IPST) and Garegin Papoian (Chemistry and Biochemistry/IPST). The paper was published on July 9, 2019, in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Milos Nikolic, UMD biophysics Ph.D. student and NCI-UMD Partnership student, published a first-author paper with Giuliano Scarcelli, assistant professor in UMD's Fischell Department of Bioengineering, in the journal Biomedical Optics Express. In their paper, the researchers show that 660 nanometers may represent an optimal wavelength for Brillouin microscopy, which is an all-optical tool for measuring the mechanical properties of biological samples.

MYC is one of the most potent cancer genes, contributing to almost every kind of cancer—yet it is still not known how it causes tumors to form. Though higher levels of MYC are present in a wide range of tumor types, MYC alone does not usually lead to tumors. Simona Patange, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics with the UMD-NCI Partnership for Integrative Cancer Research in Daniel Larson’s lab at the National Cancer Institute, is using novel tools to track MYC and its activity in individual cells.

Pratyush Tiwary, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry with a joint appointment in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, is one of 30 early-career scientists named to the 2019 “Future of Biochemistry” list in the journal Biochemistry. Tiwary develops methods for simulating the behavior of molecular systems, such as proteins, on the atomic scale.