Mechanical Unfolding Response of Proteins

Ionel Popa graduated with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering in from Gh. Asachi Technical University, in Iasi, Romania, and obtained his doctoral degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry from University of Geneva, in Switzerland, while working with Prof. Michal Borkovec. He then joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, first as a postdoc and later as an associate research scientist. At Columbia he worked with Prof. Julio M. Fernandez, where they developed a novel approach based on magnetic tweezers and covalent attachment that can study the mechanical unfolding of a single protein molecule for many hours or days. Since 2015, he joined the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he runs the Laboratory for Advanced Biopolymers and Nanomechanics of Proteins (ALBNanoPro). He is studying how the mechano-biology of proteins relate to how our muscles work, how cancer develops and spreads, and how bacteria adhere and interact with antibodies.

Ronen Berkovich received his B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from Technion in 2002, and after pursuing several years in the industry as an engineer, he obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Chemical Physics at Tel-Aviv University in 2010 in Chemical Physics with Prof. Joseph (Yossi) Klafter and Prof. Michael Urbakh. He completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University at the Department of Biological Sciences with Prof. Julio M. Fernandez, prior to joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) as a faculty member in October 2013. Beyond single molecule biophysics, his research group is studying non-linear phenomena related to soft matter mechanics, nanotribology, and particle resuspension.