AFM BioMed Conference

Dr Alice L. B. Pyne is an Associate Professor in Polymers and Soft Matter in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield, and is head of the Royce Nanocharacterisation laboratory. Her research combines high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM) and image analysis to determine how the structural and conformational heterogeneity in individual DNA molecules affect fundamental biological processes. Alice received an MSci in Physics from the University of Bristol in 2009, and an EngD in biophysics from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London, in 2015. She was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship, followed by an MRC Rutherford Innovation Fellowship, to establish an independent research programme in high resolution biomolecular AFM. Throughout her career, Alice has worked closely with industry to develop novel AFM methods capable of routinely resolving the DNA double helix on individual molecules. She has pioneered these methods to achieve time-resolved imaging of DNA at the sub-molecular scale, showing DNA molecules twisting and “dancing” in ways that had not previously been accessible. Alice is building a community in the biosciences that adopts her high-resolution imaging methods, enabled by developing an automated image analysis pipeline TopoStats which combines AFM image correction, molecule identification, and tracing into a single tool. She is spearheading an international effort to promote quantitative tools for analysis in AFM (www.github.com/AFM-SPM).

Roderick Lim is the Argovia Professor for Nanobiology at the Biozentrum and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute, University of Basel. Rod studied applied physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He trained in AFM during his PhD at the National University of Singapore where he investigated the nanotribological properties of confined liquids. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the M.E. Mueller Institute for Structural Biology at the Biozentrum, where he was awarded the 2008 P-G. de Gennes Prize “From Solid State to Biophysics” for his use of biomimetic approaches to study the nuclear pore complex. Today, his lab combines biophysical, AFM (and HS-AFM), and cellular approaches to study biological function and to explore how biological machines may be leveraged towards bio-inspired applications. A key area of interest in his lab is to understand how nucleocytoplasmic transport is regulated by nuclear pore complexes. Lim is also a co-inventor of ARTIDIS ("Automated and Reliable Tissue Diagnostics"), an atomic force microscope-based innovation for cancer diagnosis.

Felix Rico is associate professor in the department of Physics of Aix-Marseille University since 2013 and researcher at the LAI U1067, a joint Aix-Marseille University, CNRS & INSERM laboratory. He studied Physics at the University Autonoma of Barcelona and received his PhD in Biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was postdoc at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine (Miami, FL) and then at Institute Curie (Paris). He has been working in force microscopy since 2001, focusing on the mechanics and adhesion properties of biological systems. He has developed various force spectroscopy-based approaches to investigate the mechanics of single biomolecules, membranes and cells. He pioneered high-speed force spectroscopy to probe the mechanics and dynamics of single biomolecules and living cells at microsecond timescales.

Thomas Perkins is a Fellow of JILA, a joint institute between the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado. He graduated from Harvard University, did his graduate work at Stanford under Steve Chu, and post-doctoral studies at Princeton and Stanford with Steve Block. His group specializes in developing and applying high-precision single-molecule techniques to answer biological questions. Over the past decade, his group developed a series of focused-ion-beam modified cantilevers to study the folding and unfolding of proteins with enhanced precision and stability. By using cantilevers optimized for 1-µs resolution, his group re-examined the unfolding of individual bacteriorhodopsin (bR) molecules in native lipid bilayers with a 100-fold higher time resolution and a 10-fold higher force precision than previous studies. The unfolding pathway was resolved with unprecedented detail, indicating the structural elements associated with bR unfolding that were as small as two amino acids. These advances in AFM metrology have been merged with site-specific conjugation to investigate the dynamics and energetics of a wide range of additional systems ranging from small globular proteins and structured RNA molecules to effector proteins and cardiac myosin. Tom is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. He is also a long-time co-organizer of the biennial Single Molecule Biophysics meeting at the Aspen Center for Physics. Tom has received a number of awards, including the Dept. of Commerce’s Gold Medal (its highest award) and its Ron Brown Excellence in Innovation Award, an Arthur S. Flemming Award for outstanding achievement in government service, and the Colorado Governor’s award for high impact research.

Takaharu Okajima is a Professor at Hokkaido University, Faculty of Information Science and Technology since 2013. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2000. He joined the Department of Bioscience and Biotechnology at Tokyo Institute of Technology as an assistant professor (1995-2003). Since 2000, he started to develop AFM techniques for measuring mechanical properties of biological samples in the laboratory of Prof. Atsushi Ikai at Tokyo Institute of Technology and then in the laboratory of Prof. Hiroshi Tokumoto in the Nanotechnology Research Center at Hokkaido University. After he moved to the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at Hokkaido University in 2007, he focused on his research in investigating the universal and specific features of cell rheological properties with AFM. A current focus of his work with AFM is on exploring physical mechanism of multicellular systems such as developing embryo at the single cell level.

Adam J. Engler is a Professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego, where he has been on the faculty since 2008. He also is a resident scientist at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Engler previously trained with Dr. Dennis Discher at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his PhD studying how ECM stiffness regulated stem cell fate. He also trained as a postdoc with Dr. Jean Schwarzbauer at Princeton University's Department of Molecular Biology.

Dr. Engler’s research focuses on how physical and chemical properties of the niche influence or misregulates cell function and modifies genetic mechanisms of disease. In particular, his lab studies the phenomenon in the context of cardiovascular and musculoskeletal diseases and cancer. To accomplish this, his lab makes natural and synthetic matrices with unique spatiotemporal properties to mimic niche conditions, improve stem cell behavior and commitment in vitro, or direct them for therapeutic use in vivo.

Dr. Engler has received numerous awards in recognition of this research, including young investigator or mid-career awards from International Society for Matrix Biology (2008), Biomedical Engineering Society (2008), American Society of Matrix Biology (2014), American Society of Mechanical Engineering (2015), and American Society for Engineering Education (2018). Dr. Engler is a fellow of the American Institute for Biomedical Engineering and recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award grant.

Noriyuki Kodera is a Professor at the Nano Life Science Institute (WPI-NanoLSI) in the Kanazawa University. He studied Physics and received his PhD from Kanazawa University in 2005, where he was involved in the development of high-speed AFM (HS-AFM) at the laboratory of Prof. Toshio Ando. During his postdoc at Kanazawa University (2005-2010), he began research in biological application studies using HS-AFM and succeeded in the direct observation of myosin V walking along actin filaments. In 2010, he joined the faculty at Kanazawa University. After that, he has been continuously developing and improving the methods related to HS-AFM and observing proteins at work, particularly cytoskeleton-related proteins and intrinsically disordered proteins, using HS-AFM for providing novel insights into their functional mechanisms. He has received several awards, most recently the JSPS Prize (2018). From 2019, he is an elected board member of the Biophysical Society of Japan.

Florence Tama is a Professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute of Transformative biomolecules at Nagoya University and a team leader at the Center for Computational Science in RIKEN. She studied Physics and Chemistry at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse and received her Ph.D. in Biophysics in 2000. During her post-doctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute, San Diego, she started to work on the development of computational tools to integrate X-ray and cryo-EM data to build 3D models of biomolecules. In 2006, she joined the University of Arizona as an assistant professor, where she continued such developments with applications to SAXS data. In 2013, she moved to Japan, first to RIKEN, and since 2015 Nagoya University. In recent years, she has extended her work on the development of integrative modeling to X-ray Free Electron Laser data and high-speed AFM data and worked in collaboration with experimental groups to elucidate the function of biomolecules.

Lab website: https://sites.google.com/view/computationalbiophysicslab