Speaker

Dr. Sarah Veatch is an Associate Professor of Biophysics and Physics at the University of Michigan.
Her early work described liquid-liquid phase separation in membranes, mapping phase diagrams in purified membranes and describing composition fluctuations that become large and long-lived near miscibility critical points.  She subsequently found that vesicles isolated from living cell plasma membranes exhibited similar composition fluctuations, indicating that cell membranes are biologically tuned to be near a membrane phase transition at growth temperatures.  Her recent work has begun translating these concepts to intact and living cells, using single molecule fluorescence localization microscopy methods to quantify membrane composition at high spatial and temporal resolution, and developing physically rigorous models to describe functional organization within signaling processes.  Overall, her research program aims to understand how diverse cellular signaling processes exploit emergent behaviors of heterogeneous plasma membranes.

Homepage:  https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/veatch-lab/

Twitter: @veatchlab

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