5/7/2010
Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksei Aksimentiev has been selected by the National Science Foundation to receive a 2010 CAREER Award.
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Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksei Aksimentiev has been selected by the National Science Foundation to receive a 2010 CAREER Award.
Aksimentiev will use the award to investigate the transport of solutes through nanopores, using an innovative computational modeling method that combines all-atom molecular dynamics, Brownian dynamics, and multiscale simulations. The goal is to provide a comprehensive physical description of polymer transport through biological and synthetic nanopores.
"Imagine pulling a thread through a needle's eye, just a nanometer in diameter, a thousand times per minute, in the dark," said Aksimentiev. "Our nanopore translocation experiments present a unique opportunity to test physical models of diverse nanoscale phenomena at the single-molecule level."
While nanopores are ubiquitous in nature and manmade devices—their functionality ranges from transport of solutes in and out of a living cell to chemical and biological separation and drug delivery—the microscopic mechanism underlying the sensing functionality of nanopores remains largely unknown. And it is currently not possible to characterize the microscopic conformations of single biomolecules directly in a nanopore.
Aksimentiev received his PhD in chemistry cum laude from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland, after completing a master's degree in particle physics at the Ivan Franko Lviv State University in his native Ukraine. He received postdoctoral training at the Materials Science Laboratory R&D Center of Mitsui Chemicals, Tokyo, Japan, from 1999 to 2001, when he joined the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral research associate. He accepted the position of assistant professor of physics at Illinois in 2005.
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.
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Contact: Aleksei Aksimentiev, Department of Physics, 217/333-6495.
Celia M. Elliott, Department of Physics, 217/244-7725.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.