A new paper that we’ve contributed to has just been published in Applied Physics Letters, describing how specially patterned surfaces prepared by Melik Demirel’s Biointerface Engineering group at Penn State can guide the direction of neuronal growth. This work was principally performed by Cristian Staii‘s experimental biophysics group at Tufts. Our contribution to the work was to develop a mathematical model of axonal growth, based on the Fokker-Planck equation, that could be used to quantify the strength of the “steering” effect from microscope images.
We’re particularly thrilled to congratulate Ross Beighley, the lead author of the work, who is an undergraduate researcher at Tufts and was able to perform a significant part of it because he received a scholarship from the Tufts Summer Scholars program under the mentorship of Cristian Staii. This is a really great program and we encourage Tufts students to consider applying for it—well done Ross!
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