Our group is in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. We are a team of highly interdisciplinary scientists working at the intersection of nanomaterials research, near-infrared microscopy, and their application to the study of life.
Our lab shares affiliations with the Hellen Wills Neuroscience Institute, the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (qb3), and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory MBIB.
Life takes on unique characteristics at the nano-scale. We are accustomed to making observations and predictions for the behavior of living systems on a scale that is intuitive for the time and size scales of our day-to-day lives. For centuries, scientific advancements have been on a size-scale that is familiar to us: distances in meters, times in seconds, masses in kilograms, and volumes in liters. However, the building blocks of life: proteins, nucleic acids, cells, all live at a very different scale. When we zoom into life down to the molecular level, the scales used to describe distances, times, masses, and volumes shrink to a level that is not intuitive to one accustomed to living life at the macro-scale. Our lab focuses on understanding and exploiting nanomaterials to access information about biological systems stored at the nano-scale.
