Guasto Lab

Michael Stehnach comes to Tufts from Merrimack College, where he earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. Michael will be pursuing his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with interests in the fluid dynamics of cell motility. Welcome to the team Michael!

Dan Pasquale and Dan Epstein both completed summer internships in the Guasto Lab this summer working on the motility of biflagellated cells. Dan Pasquale (postbac at Tufts 2016) will be starting his graduate study at MIT in September, and Dan Epstein will be completing senior year at Newton South High School. Congratulations to Dan and Dan, and we hope to see you both back at Tufts soon!

Prof. Guasto presented recent work by Ph.D. student Amin Dehkharghani and postdoc Nicolas Waisbord on cell motility in porous media flows. The SIAM Life Sciences Meeting was held jointly with the SIAM Annual Meeting in Boston this year.

Dan Epstein is a senior at Newton South High School, who will join us as a summer intern to explore some of his interests in biomechanics. Welcome Dan!

Dan is a senior in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Tufts, who will join us as an undergraduate researcher for the summer. Welcome Dan!

In collaboration with Prof. Benjamin Wolfe in the Biology Department at Tufts University, Prof. Guasto’s group has been awarded a Tufts Collaborates! seed grant to investigate dispersal mechanisms microbial communities. The Collaborates program supports highly interdisciplinary research across the various schools at Tufts University.

In collaboration with teams from the University of Washington, UCLA, and ETH Zurich, our recent work on the role of sperm chemotaxis in egg fertilization was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The paper entitled “Sperm chemotaxis promotes individual fertilization success in sea urchins” used microfluidics to show that chemotaxis enhances a sperm cell’s ability seek out and fertilize egg cells, which is a key step in the reproductive process for marine invertebrates and many other organisms. [Link to JEB Paper]

Senior mechanical engineering undergraduate student Kevin Holbrook has been awarded a Mechanical Engineering Summer Scholar Fellowship to fund his summer research on liquid crystal dynamics in collaboration with Tim Atherton (Tufts Physics).

Prof. Guasto was awarded a NSF CAREER grant for his work on cell motility. The CAREER grants are the “National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.” Prof. Guasto’s grant entitled “The mechanics and control of cell dispersal” explores the role of realistic, physical environmental factors in regulating the transport of swimming cells for a host of applications in human health and the environment. Additional information about recent Tufts awardees can be found at the Tufts Now page.

Jeff Guasto delivered the Applied & Computational Math Seminar at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he spoke about the group’s recent work on porous media flows and bacterial transport.