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I am delighted to announce that Pam Cai has successfully defended her thesis, which outlines her outstanding theoretical and experimental work in the Spakowitz and Heilshorn labs. Congratulations, Pam! Pam Cai Heilshorn Lab

I am delighted to announce that Joe Wakim received the Centennial Teaching Assistant Award for his amazing efforts in my course “Data Science and Machine Learning Approaches in Chemical and Materials Engineering”. Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition.

My research group and I had a great time at Topgolf last night. I doubt that any of us are ready to join the tour, but it was fun.

Ariana, Joe, and I had a great time in Sofia, Bulgaria for the Genome Architecture and Function Workshop 2023. Great science, and a wonderful place to visit.

Sayantan Dutta, Ashesh Ghosh, Alistair Boettiger, and Andy Spakowitz published "Leveraging polymer modeling to reconstruct chromatin connectivity from live images" in Biophysical Journal. Excellent work, Sayantan and team! cell.com/biophysj/pdf/S…

Wes Michaels, Andy Spakowitz, and Jian Qin published our work on the conformational statistics of ribbon-like chains, which serves as a foundational model for conjugated polymers. Fantastic job, Wes and team, on this theoretical work! pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.102…

Sayantan Dutta, Ashesh Ghosh, and Andy Spakowitz published “Effect of local active fluctuations on structure and dynamics of flexible biopolymers” in Soft Matter. Congratulations, Sayantan and Ashesh, for your great work and for selection as the cover! pubs.rsc.org/en/content/art…

Michael, Joe, Ariana, and I had a great time in Minneapolis for the APS March Meeting. Great science, and not as cold as expected.

I was delighted to celebrate with my PhD advisor, Zhen-Gang Wang, when he received the Polymer Physics Prize at the 2024 APS March Meeting. This is such a well-deserved recognition of his enormous impact on our field.

Michael Beckinghausen and Andy Spakowitz published "Exploration of Phase Behavior in Asymmetric Semiflexible Polyelectrolyte Mixtures Using Polymer Field Theory" in Macromolecules, elucidating the complex phase phenomena in polyelectrolyte solutions. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

I am delighted to share that my student, Angelika Hirsch, has passed her qualifying exam in Biophysics at Stanford. Great Job, Angelika!

Joe Wakim and Andy Spakowitz published “Physical modeling of nucleosome clustering in euchromatin resulting from interactions between epigenetic reader proteins” in PNAS. Great work, Joe, elucidating the organization of chromosomal DNA in living cells. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

I am honored to share that Michael Beckinghausen successfully defended his thesis entitled “Field-Theoretic Modeling of Dipolar Fluctuations in Semiflexible Polyelectrolyte Solutions”. Congratulations to Michael for his research achievements and clear presentation of his work.

Ashesh Ghosh and Andy Spakowitz published “Local changes in protein filament properties drive large-scale membrane transformations involved in endosome tethering and fusion” in Soft Matter. Excellent work, Ashesh! pubs.rsc.org/en/content/art…

I am delighted to share that Pam Cai received the ACS Global Outstanding Graduate Student Award at the ACS meeting in Denver earlier this week. Congratulations for all your research achievements and for this well-deserved recognition. Pam Cai

It is my honor to share that my student, Ariana Tse, successfully defended her thesis entitled “From Methylation to Meiosis: Modelling Complex DNA Processes Using Polymer Physics”. Congratulations for your outstanding research and your clear communication of your work.

I greatly appreciate the thoughtful commentary that Joshua Lequieu (ChE Drexel) wrote about our recent work published in PNAS. Josh provides a very thoughtful perspective on the current progress on physical modeling of chromosomal DNA. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Ariana Tse and I published "Modeling DNA methyltransferase function to predict epigenetic correlation patterns in healthy and cancer cells" in PNAS, revealing the fundamental mechanisms for epigenetic patterning in healthy and cancer cells. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

I am grateful to the students and faculty at Penn State for the invitation to give the 2025 Barrer Lecture.  This is a great honor, and I had a wonderful time visiting State College!

I am grateful to the organizers of the Biological Physics/Physical Biology seminar series for the opportunity to discuss our theoretical work on DNA methylation patterns in living cells. Check out the video of my seminar if you would like to learn more! youtu.be/DTbkbFj2sfo