Guasto Lab

Professor Guasto publishes a paper in Nature Physics with collaborators from MIT on how fluid shear traps swimming bacteria, reducing their ability to explore their environment. See also the accompanying article by the MIT News office.

Prof. Guasto delivered  two invited talks at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at University of California – Santa Barbara this week, including one at the “Active Processes in Living and Non-living Matter” conference on flagellar buckling in marine bacteria. He also gave a second talk on the “Acrobatics of swimming bacteria”  at the associated “The Physics of Flocking: From Cells to Crowds” geared toward high school science teachers. Both talks as well as all other talks from the conferences are freely available online through the Kavli Institute (see links provided above).

Ray Bjorkman, a Tufts undergraduate ME major, joins the group to study liquid crystal dynamics in collaboration with Tim Atherton from the Dept. of Physics. Welcome Ray!

Professor Jeff Guasto gave a seminar to the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in the Mechanics: Modeling, Experimentation, Computation (MMEC) seminar series. His is talk entitled “The function, failure, and evolution of flagella” focused on the mechanics and kinematics of flagella for locomotion in both bacteria and sperm.

Undergraduate researcher Joe Carroll joins the group to study the kinematics of human sperm flagella. Welcome Joe!

Professor Guasto publishes a paper in Nature Physics with collaborators from MIT on how swimming bacteria can turn by triggering a buckling mechanism in their flagellum. See also accompanying ‘News and Views’ in Nature Physics and the article by the MIT News office.

Professor Jeff Guasto will be joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts in September, coming off of a postdoc at MIT.