News
Spotlight
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Protein Dynamics Illustration and Analogy In the newest issue of the journal Nature, a Career Feature |
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Two ASU physics professor named as Scialog fellows Scialog – Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation havenamed Banu Ozkan and Steve Presse, physics professors at Arizona State University, as outstanding Scialog fellows. Scialog invests high-risk and highly-impactful discovery research on untested ideas with the ultimate goal of providing fundamental principles that make a collection of molecules within a cell produce behaviors associated with life. |
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Douglas Shepherd, an assistant professor in Arizona State University’s Department of Physics, was recently awarded two Scialog Advanced Bioimaging awards that will fund two research projects using optics to visualize and quantify molecular biology in challenging settings. |
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HSQC NMR data indicate that GNCA-XYZ is more dynamic than GNCA β-lactamase. Arizona State University researchers Tushar Modi and Banu Ozkan of the Department of Physics, and Wade Van Horn and Mubark Mebrat, both of the School of Molecular Sciences, along with colleagues from other institutions, report on a breakthrough that improves understanding of the relationship between protein structure, dynamics and function. Their results have important implications for medical, biotechnological and molecular research. |
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MDAnalysis: Faster, Extensible Molecular Analysis for Reproducible Science The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) awarded Dr. Oliver Beckstein (Arizona State University, Center for Biological Physics) funding for work toward creating foundational open source software tools essential to biomedicine. Dr. Beckstein is lead on the MDAnalysis project, one of the most widely used libraries for the analysis of biomolecular simulations and structures, has established a mature core functionality that underpins analysis workflows in academia and industry. This project is focused on two areas of strategic growth: (1) improving the performance of essential core components by rewriting Python code in Cython; and (2) broadening the user and developer base by separating non-core modules into “MDAKits” (MDAnalysis Toolkits, akin to SciPy’s SciKits) to enable the rapid development and dissemination of new components and tools that can be released independently of the main package. |
Student Achievements
ASU Advanced computing center awards computing time
Varda Faghir Hagh has been awarded computing time from ASU's Advanced Computing Center. Varda is a PhD student at Prof. Michael Thorpe’s research group and she works on percolation theory. Recently ASU Advanced Computing Center (A2C2) has generously extended a grant of 70,000 core hours to her to pursue research on rigidity percolation in jammed systems. They have also featured her research in the A2C2 Quarterly newsletter.
2020 Goldwater Scholarship Winners - Tal Sneh
Three ASU students were among the recipients of this year's Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Scholarship awards. Tal Sneh, a Physics undergraduate student Rizal Hariadi's lab, noted his career goals as earning a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and to apply nanotechnology as a professor at a university to develop affordable tools that address diagnostic and therapeutic challenges in the field. Other winners from ASU include Delondrae Carter, Undergraduate Student, Earth and Space Exploration (Astrophysics) and Alexis Hocken, Undergraduate Student, Chemical Engineering.
BPS 2020 Art Contest Winner : Fiona Naughton
Fiona Naughton, post-doctoral scholar working with Dr. Oliver Beckstein, won first place in the Art of Science Image Contest at this year's annual BPS (BioPhysical Society) meeting with her illustration, “If Proteins Were Cats.” The Art of Science Image Contest is a feature every year, with approximately 10 finalists chosen to display their work in an open exhibit. Winners are determined by the vote of the conference attendees. “Often, the entries are more directly obtained in the course of research, and I was a bit worried people might find a cat sketch too silly or irrelevant — so I was happy to know that people had liked it and really excited to win first place!” Naughton said. “It was great to see the effort I'd put into it pay off.”
AAAS Poster Presentation
Tal Sneh, a Physics undergraduate student Rizal Hariadi's lab, is one of the winners of the 2020 AAAS Student E-Poster Competition at the 2020 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Annual meeting in Seattle, Washington where he received an Honorable Mention in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology category. Tal will be recognized in the upcoming issue of Science and is also nominated for the Goldwater Scholarship Award. https://www.sciencemag.org/ https://goldwater.scholarsapply.org/
Other news
New study brings medicine closer to non-addictive painkillers
Powerful opiate drugs are a mainstay in modern medicine, alleviating pain in both acute and chronic forms. These charms however, bear a curse. Users quickly develop tolerance to their effects, requiring ever-increasing doses of the drug. Further, such opioid compounds lead to drug dependence, owing to their notoriously addictive qualities.
Life in motion: ASU biophysics trains students in a young field
The biophysics program at Arizona State University mirrors the field itself in both its interdisciplinary breadth and its youth. Biology, under one historical name or another, dates back to the beginning of science, at least as far back as Aristotle’s work in physiology and his categorization of plant and animal species. Physics has an equally long history; coincidentally, Aristotle was also the first to call the study of motion “physics,” thereby giving the field the name that has lasted in English to modern times.