From the 2011 Physics Alumni Newsletter
This past year has been a good year for the Physics Department. We had a record number of graduate students who accepted our offers and came last fall. We continue to have a large number of undergraduate majors. This academic year we have 34 majors in their junior or senior years, 14 of whom are signed up for our newest degree, a Bachelor of Science in Biophysics. Our tradition of undergraduate research continues. Last year 25 undergraduate students engaged in research with our faculty. If you look around Olin, you will see posters and publications in our halls bearing the names of both our undergraduate and graduate students. You can also read about some of the students and their research projects at http://www.wfu.edu/physics/profiles/profiles.html. A number of our faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students have received honors and awards in the past year. Below I describe some of these honors, as well as some other noteworthy events of the past year.
The person whose name has shown up most frequently on the Physics Department website during the past year is Prof. Timo Thonhauser. For excellence in teaching and research he has been awarded the Ranlet and Frank Bell Jr. Fellowship for 2011 – 2013. This is a faculty fellowship which is sponsored through private donors who wish to support faculty members who teach about or conduct research on the environment. The selected faculty members are also known as Environmental Resources Faculty Fellows. For his excellence in teaching, Timo also received the Physics Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award which is given annually to one of the faculty members in our Department. And, because of his excellence in research, Timo has been selected by the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) to be a KITP Scholar for 2011 – 2013. The KITP is located at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is directed by Nobel laureate David Gross. The KITP has routinely attracted the best scientists not only from the U.S., but also from around the world to participate in its programs. It has, consequently, become the preeminent international center for advancing theory in science. Each year the institute selects approximately 7 scholars nationwide to become KITP Scholars based on their research accomplishments and future research potential.
Timo’s research is devoted to the application of condensed-matter theory to currently outstanding problems in physics, biophysics, chemistry, and materials science. His motivation is the desire to advance the exploration of materials in these fields by developing and applying new electronic-structure approaches, methods, and computational tools. Currently, he is working on an approach to calculate ab-initio NMR chemical shifts, and the description of van der Waals forces within density functional theory. Both research fields have direct applications to nano-, bio-, and energy-related materials. Timo was recently interviewed by ScienceWatch, Thomson Reuters about an important paper he and his collaborators have written which has received a large number of citations. You can read the interview by going to http://sciencewatch.com/dr/fmf/2011/11julfmf/11julfmfThon/.
A second faculty member has also received a faculty fellowship. This summer, Prof. Martin Guthold was named a Wake Forest Faculty Fellow. This is a two year award that recognizes Martin as one of Wake Forest’s best teacher-scholars. Martin has previously received both the Wake Forest Excellence in Teaching Award and the Wake Forest Excellence in Research Award. His research interests are at the interface of Biophysics, Molecular Biology and nanotechnology.
Last year I mentioned that Martin, in collaboration with Prof. Jed Macosko, several students, and I, invented a new technology which may dramatically cut the time it takes to develop new drugs. It is called “Lab-on-Bead NanoSelection”. Another project Martin is working on involves the mechanical properties of fibrin fibers which form the structural and mechanical backbone of a blood clot. The macroscopic properties of a clot are well known and can be related to clotting disorders. However, the underlying microscopic mechanisms, which determine the behavior of the whole clot are not understood. Clots form when soluble fibrinogen is converted to fibrin monomers that polymerize to form a branched network of fibrin fibers. The mechanical properties of such a branched network depend on the network architecture and the mechanical properties of the individual fibers. These properties are poorly understood. His group has developed an atomic force/fluorescence microscopy technique to study the mechanical properties of single fibrin fibers. They use the tip of the atomic force microscope (AFM) to stretch fibers suspended across 12 μm-wide channels; and the fluorescence microscope is used to image this stretching. This work will help to construct and test good mechanical models of blood clots, and thus advance our understanding of wound healing, heart attacks and strokes.
Prof. Fred Salisbury won the University’s Excellence in Research Award. This award is given annually to one or two faculty members who are assistant or associate professors and who have been here for no more than 10 years. Dr. Salisbury’s research in computational biophysics is currently focused on applying physics-based methods to the study of the relationship between protein dynamics and protein function and in applying the understanding gained from these studies, along with the methods used, to drug discovery. Specifically, he has two main linked interests in protein dynamics. The first is to understand the free energy surfaces of folded proteins, how these surfaces are perturbed via interactions with other molecules, and how to exploit these perturbations to develop new therapeutics. His second main interest is to understand how proteins communicate as proteins; how does part of a protein “know” that a binding event took place tens of nanometers away? An important example of his research in these areas is the success that Dr. Salsbury and his collaborators have had in studying how specific DNA repair proteins recognize mistakes in DNA as being different from damage, and how to use these differences to discover molecules that exploit these differences. They are hopeful that this work will be the basis for new chemotherapeutics.