5/6/2010 Celia Elliott
Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksei Aksimentiev has been selected to receive a prestigious 2010 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
Written by Celia Elliott
Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksei Aksimentiev has been selected by the National Science Foundation to receive a 2010 CAREER Award. 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.
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.