This year, we are delighted to host Dr. M. Scott Shell, who serves as Department Vice Chair for Chemical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, and Dr. Marina Feric Mahynski, a PRAT Fellow at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health, as our keynote speakers.

Dr. M. Scott Shell

Prof. M. Scott Shell is the Myers Founder’s Chair Professor and Vice Chair of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara.  He earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton in 2005, followed by a postdoc in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UC San Francisco from 2005-07.  Prof. Shell’s group develops novel molecular simulation, multiscale modeling, and statistical thermodynamic approaches to address problems in contemporary biophysics and soft condensed matter. Recent areas of interest include self-assembled peptide materials, nanobubbles, hydrophobic interfaces, colloid-polymer materials, and nanoparticle-membrane interactions.  He is the recipient of a Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award (2007), an NSF CAREER Award (2009), a Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship (2010), a Northrop-Grumman Teaching Award (2011), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2012), a UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award (2014), the Dudley A. Saville Lectureship at Princeton (2015), and the CoMSEF Impact Award from AIChE (2017).

Dr. M. Scott Shell

Dr. Marina Feric

Marina Feric is a PRAT postdoctoral fellow in Tom Misteli's laboratory at the National Cancer Institute of the NIH. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University under the mentorship of Clifford Brangwynne. During her graduate studies, Marina probed how the physical organization of the cell changes as it grows. Working with the large eggs from the frog X. laevis, she discovered that gravity becomes a dominant force during growth, and that these large cells have evolved a dedicated nuclear actin meshwork to kinetically stabilize their contents under gravitational forces. Delving deeper into these cells, Marina found how the multi-layered structure of the nucleolus, an organelle directly linked to cell size, can arise from differences in miscibility among its liquid-like components without the need for membraned dividers. As a postdoctoral fellow, Marina is tackling the complementary problem to cellular organization at large length scales by researching mechanisms that cause the cell to age at accelerated time scales. Using the premature aging disease Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome as a model system for aging, she is investigating the role of phase separation in the assembly and regulation of nucleoprotein complexes called mitochondrial nucleoids, which are known drivers of aging. Her overarching goal is to lead a research team to explore how biophysical interactions among proteins and nucleic acids across multiple scales contribute to proper cellular organization and how their dysregulation gives rise to disease.

Dr. Marina Feric

Contact

Contact Kurt Ristroph (ristroph@princeton.edu) or Nancy Lu (nblu@princeton.edu) with any questions.