2/10/2010
Assistant Professor of Physics Yann R. Chemla has been awarded a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
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Assistant Professor of Physics Yann R. Chemla has been awarded a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) initiative selects the nation's best young university faculty in a highly competitive annual program. These teacher-scholars are recognized for their extraordinary promise to integrate research and education in the nation's universities and to make lifelong contributions to their disciplines.
Chemla will use the award to investigate DNA-protein dynamics using novel optical trapping techniques that he has pioneered. The protein–nucleic-acid interactions that he will study lie at the heart of many fundamental biological processes that regulate the life of the cell.
Most recently, Chemla's group, in collaboration with Ido Golding and his students, developed a new technique that allows researchers to watch bacteria swim for long durations with high precision, using optical traps, microfluidic chambers, and fluorescence imaging.
Chemla received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. As an experimentalist in applied superconductivity, he developed an interest in biology through his study of magnetotactic bacteria with a superconducting magnetometer and the development of a biosensor based on functionalized magnetic nanoparticles.
Chemla made the leap to biophysics as an NIH Ruth Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow, moving down the hall to Professor Carlos Bustamante’s laboratory at Berkeley. There, he learned the techniques of single-molecule manipulation and used an optical trap to study viral DNA packaging. In 2005, he received the prestigious Career Award at the Scientific Interface (CASI) from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. He joined the Department of Physics at Illinois in January 2007.
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Contact: Yann R. Chemla, Department of Physics, 217/333-6501.
Writer: Celia M. Elliott, Department of Physics, 217/244-7725.