Dennis Discher
Professor, Chemical & Biomolecular, Mechanical, and Bio- Engineering;
Physics
and Cell & Molecular Biology Graduate Groups;
Institute
for Medicine & Eng'g; The
Wistar Institute - Structural Biology Program;
Materials Research
Science & Eng'g. Center;
Pennsylvania Muscle
Institute
*positions
are also generally open in many of the areas listed below *
|
Post-doctoral Fellows and PhD students |
|
Florian
Rehfeldt rehfeldt
@sas.upenn.edu |
|
Karthikan Rajagopal kr @seas.upenn.edu |
|
Sharon Loverde loverde @vitae.cmm.upenn.edu |
|
David Christian
dac2 @seas.upenn.edu |
|
David Pajerowski
davidpaj
@seas.upenn.edu |
|
Richard Tsai
tsair
@seas.upenn.edu |
|
Andre
Brown aebrown @sas.upenn.edu |
|
Christine Carag caragci
@seas.upenn.edu |
|
Aiwei Tian aiwei @seas.upenn.edu |
|
Brian C. Chase chasebc @seas.upenn.edu |
|
Research Fellows, Masters, and Undergrad Students |
|
Manu Tewari manu
@seas.upenn.edu Xiulian Du xiulian
@mail.med.upenn.edu |
|
emeritus Catherine Picart membrane & polymer physics Yan Geng Diblock
copolymer worm micelles Kris Dahl
Lucie Bacakova Muscle Cell adhesion PhD 2006 in
Mechanical Eng’g & Applied Mechanics, Post Doc in Schwarzbauer Lab,
Princeton Muscle and stem cell
differentiation & adhesion on soft
substrates Paul Dalhaimer drug delivery w/ block copolymer worm
micelles, liquid crystal elastomers - simul'n thru expts. PhD
2005 in Bioengineering, Preparation,
characterization & drug delivery with polymersomes Shyamsundar Subramanian CD47 and RBCs Maureen Griffin muscle cell adhesion Richard Law single molecule AFM of proteins and also intact membranes Peter Photos CD47, polymersomes, and phagocyte interactions Adam Eckhardt Smooth Muscle Cell Spreading Ranganath Parthasarathy Yeast display Nishant Bhasin AFM protein unfolding Kandaswamy Vijayan Charged
Worm Micelle Dynamics and Properties Vanessa Ortiz Simulation of soft matter systems with molecular methods Colin Johnson Protein unfolding in cells Younghoon Kim Drug delivery with polymerosomes Shamik Sen Muscle cell adhesion & AFM indentation theory Shenshen Cai Polymeric carriers for drug delivery |
A unifying theme
in the bulk of our studies is membranes and interfaces. Primary systems in
focus include: copolymer-based mimics of biomembranes
- "Polymersomes", 'marker of self' proteins on natural
membranes, membrane skeletons and their component mechanics down to single molceules, membrane adhesion
FLEXIBLE FILOMICELLES & TOUGH POLYMERSOMES FOR DRUG DELIVERY : In
collaboration with Tamara Minko (
SINGLE
MOLECULE EXTENSIBILITY:
Single protein molecules are being stretched with molecular force probe
techniques and were the first to conduct single molecule chemistry on extended
molecules and to correlate the strong effects of Temperature with
. Our primary focus is on cytoskeletal proteins such
as spectrin (Biophysical J. 2003) and adhesion proteins such as VCAM-1.
.Atomic Force Microscopy approaches are being employed in these single molecule
studies and indicate that beta-spectrin can be forced
to unfold. The first protein studied by these methods was an Ig-superfamily adhesion molecule involved in melanomas and
known as Mel-CAM (P.N.A.S. 2001). 
CELL MECHANICS
& ADHESION: Growth and
differentiation of cells - mesenchymal stem cells, myocytes, and a few other cell types – are studied on
elastic and patterned substrates for the purpose of characterizing their
differentiation, lineage commitment, adhesion, and other biomechanical
properties. Muscle cell work is done in collaboration
with PENN colleagues
A