Dmitry Kleinbock is awarded a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics

Professor of Mathematics Dmitry Kleinbock has been awarded a prestigious Simons Fellowship in Mathematics, which will support research activities during his sabbatical leave in the fall of 2022.

Kleinbock’s research deals with dynamical systems of algebraic origin and their applications to number theory. A dynamical system is simply a set of points together with an evolution law that governs the way points move over time. It turns out that many mathematical problems concerning integer solutions of some equations or inequalities can be understood in terms of the behavior of certain dynamical systems. Furthermore, systems that arise in this context are of algebraic nature (so called flows on homogeneous spaces of Lie groups), which makes it possible to use a wide variety of sophisticated tools such as representation theory, hyperbolic geometry and geometry of lattices.

During the Spring 2022 semester Kleinbock is visiting the Institute for Mathematical Research at ETH (Zürich, Switzerland), giving a lecture course on the topic of dynamics on homogeneous spaces. The plan for the spring is to finish several projects and start new collaborations. Then in the Fall 2022 semester Kleinbock will be a member of a thematic program on Applications of Dynamics in Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ, led by Tamar Ziegler (Hebrew University, Jerusalem). This will be an excellent opportunity, thanks to the Simons Fellowship, to explore further connections between dynamics and number theory.

Grace Han and 2 Alumni Receive 2022 Sloan Foundation Fellowships

Grace Han (left) and her group.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced the winners of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships. These fellowships are awarded to early-career scientists that represent the most promising researchers working today. Winners receive $75,000, which can be used to support their research over a two-year term. Grace Han, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and the Landsman Career Development Chair in the Sciences is one of the 2022 recipients.

The major goal of Dr. Grace Han’s research program is to develop functional organic material systems that exhibit phase transitions triggered by external stimuli, notably light. The photo-controlled phase-change materials have a game-changing potential in waste heat recycling and storage, photo-actuation, photo-lithography, and photo-regulated adhesion. In particular, the novel strategy to optically ‘fix’ a liquid phase under fluctuating temperatures allows for a long-term latent heat storage and a triggered release of energy, which is not attainable by conventional phase-change materials such as paraffins or salt hydrates. To achieve this goal, her team investigates the photo-induced structural and polarity changes of molecular switches based on azobenzene, which reversibly controls the phase of materials.

The Sloan Research Fellowship will support the new direction of Han group’s research in expanding the materials set by the rational design of photoswitches with enhanced optical and thermal properties, which will address the challenges of the current state-of-the-art switches.

Two Brandeis alumni also received 2022 fellowships: Netta Engelhardt, BS ’11 (Physics) and Dapeng Bi, PhD ’12 (Physics).

Gieseking Receives NSF CAREER Award

Rebecca Gieseking, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, has received an NSF CAREER award from the Chemical Theory, Models and Computational Methods program. This award will enable her research group to develop computational models that provide chemical understanding of how light interacts with metal nanoclusters.

Harnessing solar energy is crucial to reduce humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels and alleviate the environmental impact of our ever-increasing demand for energy. Noble metal nanoclusters containing tens to hundreds of metal atoms have the potential to revolutionize solar energy technologies by harnessing light to produce chemical fuels. These nanoclusters strongly absorb light because they support plasmons, which are collective oscillations of the electrons. Understanding, controlling, and manipulating the plasmon properties is key to improving the efficiency of solar energy storage.

Rebecca has shown that efficient computational models can accurately model the light absorption of metal nanocluster, and her group is now extending these models to understand the decay processes after metal nanoclusters absorb light. They are using these models to understand how these decay processes change as a function of nanocluster size, shape, and composition to design metal nanoclusters with controllable decay time scales for efficient solar energy storage.

Bulbul Chakraborty Elected AAAS Fellow

Bulbul Chakraborty, the Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics and head of the Division of Science, has been named a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This honor is in recognition of Professor Chakraborty’s important theoretical contributions in the area of condensed matter physics, particularly disordered systems including frustrated magnets and granular materials.

Chakraborty has been a Brandeis faculty member since 1989. She is a condensed matter theorist who is currently focused on understanding the emergence of rigidity in solids that emerge in strongly nonequilibrium processes such as jamming or gelation.

A virtual induction ceremony for the newly elected Fellows will be held in February 2021.

Read more: BrandeisNow

Hedstrom Receives NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award

Brandeis University chemical biologist Lizbeth Hedstrom received one of nine Director’s Transformative Research Awards this year from the National Institutes of Health under its High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program.  The 5-year, $3.5 mil grant will support the development of new methods for drug design relying on targeted protein degradation.  This emerging strategy has several potential therapeutic advantages over traditional approaches, including the development of more potent, longer acting, drugs.

The rational design of ‘degraders’ has focused almost exclusively on degradation induced when the target protein is modified with ubiquitin.  In contrast, Hedstrom will be developing ubiquitin-independent strategies.

The Rogers Lab receives a prestigious international grant to study the origin of life

Professor W. Benjamin Rogers in the Department of Physics has been awarded a 2020 Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) collaborative Program Grant to create a self-propagating synthetic cell. The HFSP Program Grants aim to tackle big questions in the life sciences by supporting and bringing together researchers with different backgrounds from different countries. Professor Rogers’ team grant was one of 20 successful Program Grants that went through a year-long global selection process.

The project aims to build a stably-propagating cell from simple components. The cell will have a lipid membrane encapsulating DNA and transcription-translation machinery, and be able to grow and divide by internally synthesizing its own membrane material.

The project is significant because a stably propagating cell is a vital element of natural selection. Extant life on Earth is a consequence of natural selection acting upon earlier forms of life, shaping the lineages over time. Thus at some point early in life’s origins, a sustainably propagating cell must have emerged, allowing selective advantages to accumulate over successive generations. For daughter cells to have retained the attributes of their parent, both the genetic information and the cell contents must have been replicated with reasonable fidelity.  However, it is currently unclear how controlled cell division could have first emerged from relatively simple molecules. It is precisely this mystery that the team hopes to understand by attempting to recreate it in a test tube.

Professor Rogers’ grant is shared with Dr. Yutetsu Kuruma from Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Professor Anna Wang from University of New South Wales in Australia.

Eve Marder and Liqun Luo receive 2019 NAS awards

Eve Marder, the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience, has received the 2019 National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences. The National Academy of Sciences is recognizing “Marder’s research of over more than 40 years that has provided transformative insight into the fundamental processes of animal and human brains.” NAS also called Marder “one of the most influential neuroscientists of her generation”.

In addition to her research, NAS acknowledged Marder’s impact upon young scientists working in her field. She has served as a mentor to “generations of neuroscientists”.  A book titled “Lessons from the Lobster: Eve Marder’s Work in Neuroscience” by Charlotte Nassim and was published in 2018.

The NAS Award in the Neurosciences is given only once every three years.

In addition to Marder, a Ph.D. alumnus is among the 18 scientists that are being recognized this year. Liqun Luo received the Pradel Research Award.  In the press release, NAS cited Luo’s “pioneering research into neural circuits of invertebrates and vertebrates.”

Luo earned his Ph.D. in Biology from Brandeis in 1992. He worked in Kalpana White’s lab. He is now a Professor and HHMI Investigator at Stanford University.

Read more at Brandeis Now.

Jeff Gelles to Receive 2019 BPS Kazuhito Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics

Congratulations to Jeff Gelles, Aron and Imre Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. He will receive the 2019 Kazuhito Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics from the Biophysical Society (BPS). He will be honored at the Society’s 63rd Annual Meeting at the Baltimore Convention Center on March 5, 2019, during the annual Awards Symposium.

The award, named for Professor Kazuhiko Kinosita, seeks to advance cross-disciplinary research and cultivate an appreciation of single-molecule studies. BPS President Angela Gronenborn, University of Pittsburgh, said “Jeff has conducted single-molecule studies at the highest level and continues to spark interests in engaging others in single-molecule studies.” (BPS Press Release)

Ivanovic Receives 2017 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award

photo: Mike Lovett

Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Tijana Ivanovic has received a 2017 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. This award is part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, designed to fund early career investigators who propose innovative and potentially transformative projects. Ivanovic will receive $1,500,000 in direct costs over five years to spearhead a research program aimed at comprehensively characterizing molecular changes in the viral cell-entry protein hemagglutinin (HA) that define pandemic influenza viruses. With the generated insights, Ivanovic hopes to ultimately be in a position to predict the pandemic potential of influenza viruses circulating in nature.

HA densely covers the influenza virion surface, where it allows the virus to both recognize and penetrate (fuse with) the cells of its host. HA is also a key target of neutralizing antibodies that protect us from influenza infection. An influenza pandemic is characterized by the adaptation of a new HA subtype to cell entry into human cells (of what was originally an avian virus). Without the pre-existing immunity to protect us, the virus quickly spreads around the globe. During pandemic adaptation, both HA functions in target-cell recognition and membrane fusion undergo key molecular changes. Ivanovic will use a custom-built Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscope (TIRFM) to visualize, in real time, individual virus particles as they engage and fuse with target cell membranes. This system will allow her to obtain large-scale quantitative information about distinct HA functions at an unprecedented level of detail. She will compare avian viruses with their evolutionary offspring that infected humans, including past pandemic strains. She hopes to develop models for predicting which viruses will lead to a major flu outbreak.

Ivanovic obtained a PhD in virology from Harvard University and carried out postdoctoral research with Stephen Harrison in molecular biophysics. She integrates these diverse backgrounds in her laboratory, where members are trained across these two and other synergistic areas (such as laser microscope optics, and analytical and computational modeling). The funds from the New Innovator award have created new opportunities for hiring, and the lab is actively recruiting postdocs, PhD students (from the Biochemistry and Biophysics, Molecular and Cell Biology, and Physics graduate programs) and undergraduate researchers to undertake this ambitious program.

Jordan Pollack Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

The International Society for Artificial Life. has awarded a lifetime achievement award to Jordan Pollack, Professor of Computer Science and Chairman of Computer Science department, for his work on robotics, computer-simulated evolution and artificial life forms. Pollack, who has been a Brandeis faculty member for the past 23 years, is also the director of the Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization (DEMO). DEMO is a research lab where Pollack and his students study recurrent neural networks, evolutionary computation, and dynamical systems.

Pollack received the lifetime award last week (September 4-8) at The European Conference on Artificial Life 2017 in Lyon, France. Nick Moran and Jordan Pollack’s paper “Effects of Cooperative and Competitive Coevolution on Complexity in a Linguistic Prediction Game” (MITCogNet) also received the best paper award at the conference.

In an interview with Brandeis Now, Professor Pollack discusses his career and research.