|
|||||||||||||||||||
We are looking for someone from physical and other quantitative sciences with strong experimental background in statistical physics and soft condensed matter physics with exposure to biological physics, who wishes to answer real biological questions. We prefer experimentalists with an analytical mindset. A recent (or soon-to-be) PhD with strong passion, enthusiasm for research and good work ethic shouldn't be shy to contact us with Letter of Motivation, CV and contact info for three references. A very brief description of our research is as follows, but you will have to contact us to understand the real work-in-progress in the lab.
The mission of our lab is to understand the general, fundamental principles in biology using both physical and biological approaches. We are particularly interested in bacterial cell cycle, and our focus so far has been on bacterial chromosome segregation -- one of the basic, and yet unsolved, problems in biology. We believe the basic physical & theoretical framework of bacterial chromosome segregate has been established, and we thus have been focusing on the experimental side.
Two lines of our research in the lab are as follows.
1. We are interested in the growth of E.coli. Our microfluidic continuous culture device, Entrapped Cells Organized for Live Imaging (ECOLI), allows us study and follow many cells for many generations, which we believe will change the way microbiologists do their experiments. Using ECOLI, we have been studying from classic problems of nutrient shift-up and shift-down to chromosome dynamics in vivo. One of our main questions is to understand the "causality" of the cell cycle events. We have a number of biologists collaborating with us.
2. We study bacterial chromosomes in confined space. This is not only a new way of studying polymer physics, but is to understand how physical properties of bacterial chromosomes change during the cell cycle.