Itamar Kolvin
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Physics·Early-career
Cells and tissues build strong webs out of tiny fibers by assembling them step by step. Engineers have trouble copying this, because fibers cannot be placed one by one.
- Fields
Physics
Biophysics
Materials Science
- Topics
active matter
soft matter
filaments
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Determine how active forces from kinesin motors walking on microtubules disrupt arrangements of bacterial flagellar filaments that would be stable under ordinary thermal motion.
- Test whether active forces relieve entanglements in glasses of repulsively interacting flagella, crowded networks that resist deformation, allowing the filaments to flow.
- Test whether active forces rearrange attractively interacting flagella in weak gels into thick bundles that then link into larger, more robust networks.
- Use flagella of precisely controlled helical shape and length as model rods to learn how filament geometry affects assembly driven by microtubule-kinesin activity.
More about the research
Instead they drift randomly, collide and stick, which tends to make weak, misshapen structures, especially for long fibers that move slowly. This project asks whether chemical fuel and molecular motors can push fibers around so they rearrange into stronger structures that use less material.
Why it matters
Fiber-based materials made in the lab are limited because long fibers assemble slowly into weak structures. Learning how molecular motors can reorganize filaments into bundles and robust networks could lead to lighter, stronger filament-based materials for biotechnology, including possible materials for wound healing and growing artificial organs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xiang Cheng
University of Minnesota, MN·Engineering
Engineer a fluorescent bacterial strain with tunable swimming speed and tumble frequency, and image single cells inside dense suspensions to link individual swimming to local turbulent flow and test competing active-matter theories.
Frederick MacKintosh
Rice University, TX·Physics
Develop a predictive effective medium theory, an averaging method that treats the network as a uniform material, for the strain-driven stiffening transition in 2D and 3D networks of stiff, athermal fibers such as collagen.
Daniel Boyanovsky
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Physics
Calculate how axion dark matter candidates were produced, decayed, and thermalized in the early universe, using non-equilibrium effective field theory, a simplified particle-physics description for changing conditions, to predict dark matter abundance.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.