Students

Below are the Physics Department PhD students working in biophysics. Students from other Departments and graduate programs are welcome to take part in PLS activities (alumni of program are listed at bottom of page).

Class entering 2024

Rosalind Huang
Bahar Shakerifakher
Jasmine Xiong

Class entering 2023

Hamza Coban
Armaun Sanayei
Sergio Eraso

Class entering 2022

Amer Al-Hiyasat (Tailleur Group)
Jessica Metzger (Fakhri Lab)

Class entering 2021

Lisa Lin (Fakhri Lab)
Deepti Kannan (Fakhri Lab)
Ari Liu (Gore Lab)
Henrik Pinholt (Gore Lab)

Class entering 2020

Jinyeop Song (Gore Lab)
Daniel Swartz (Gore Lab)
Yuchao Chen (Gore Lab)
Enrique Toloza (Harnett Lab)

Class entering 2019

Bola Malek (Cisse Lab)
Nicolas Romeo (Dunkel Lab)

Class entering 2018

Hugh Higginbotham (Kardar Lab)

Class entering 2017

Blox Bloxham (Gore Lab)
Ming Zheng (Kardar Lab)

Alumni

Below is an incomplete list of alumni from the MIT Physics PhD program whose dissertation was in biophysics or soft matter (or who later switched into these fields). Please email Tader Shipley (tshipley@mit.edu) if you would like to be added to this list!

  • Hyunseok Lee (with Jeff Gore) is a PLS Fellow with Jeff Gore at MIT.
  • Sherry Chu (with Mehran Kadar).
  • Choongman Lee (with Ibrahim Cisse) is a postdoc with Ibrahim Cisse at the Max Planck Institute.
  • Junang Li (with Nikta Fakhri) is a Associate Research Scholar/CPBF Fellow at Princeton University.
  • Jeremy Owen (with Jeremy England) is a postdoc with Tom Muir at Princeton University.
  • Sameer Abrahim (with Leonid Mirny).
  • Pearson Miller (with Jorn Dunkel) is a research fellow with the Flatiron Institute.
  • Yoon Jung (with Nikta Fakhri).
  • Katherine Lawrence (with Michael Desai) .
  • Melis Tekant (with Nikta Fakhri) is a research analysts with Cubist Systematic Strategies.
  • Owen Andrews (with Ibrahim Cisse) is a postdoc with The Broad Institute.
  • Alex Bacanu (with Nikta Fakhri) is a postdoc with Sharad Ramanathan at Harvard University,
  • David Theurel (with Matt Wilson).
  • Takuma Inoue (with Ibrahim Cisse).
  • Clare Abreu (PhD ’20 with Jeff Gore) is a postdoc with Dmitri Petrov at Stanford University.
  • Tatiana Artemova (PhD ’15 with Jeff Gore).
  • Murat Acar (PhD ’07 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is a Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University.
  • Tanya Artemova (PhD ’15 with Jeff Gore).
  • Jeff Chabot (PhD ’05 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is in the Dept of Systems Biology at Pfizer.
  • Jeffrey Chuang (PhD ’01 with Kardar, Tanaka, and Grosberg) is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Boston College
  • Arolyn Conwill (PhD ’16 with Gore) is a postdoc with Tami Lieberman at MIT.
  • Lei Dai (PhD ’14 with Gore) is a professor in Shenzhen, China.
  • Raissa D’Souza (PhD ’99 with Mehran Kardar) is Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis.
  • Deniz Ertas (PhD ’95 with Mehran Kardar) is a Senior Research Associate at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering.
  • Martin Falk (PhD ’19 with Leonid Mirny and Michael Brenner).
  • David Feldman (PhD ’19 with Paul Blainey).
  • Saurabh Gandhi (PhD ’18 with Jeff Gore).
  • Anton Goloborodko (PhD ’18 with Leonid Mirny).
  • Terence Hwa (PhD ’90 with Mehran Kardar) is Professor of Physics and Molecular Biology at UCSD.
  • Maxim Imakaev (PhD ’15 with Leonid Mirny) is a postdoc at Harvard Medical School.
  • Joon Ho Kang (PhD ’19 with Scott Manalis).
  • Mikail Khona (PhD ’23 with Fiete)
  • Dong hyun Kim (PhD ’12 with Alexander van Oudenaarden) works at Samsung in Seoul, Korea.
  • Andrej Kosmrlj (PhD ’11 with Chakraborty and Kardar) is a professor at Princeton University
  • Jean-Benoit Lalanne (PhD ’20 with Gene-wei Li).
  • Hao Li (PhD ’92 with Mehran Kardar and K. Huang) is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF.
  • Robert Marsland (PhD ’17 with Jeremy England) is now a postdoc at BU with Pankaj Mehta.
  • Ernesto Medina Dagger (PhD ’91 with Mehran Kardar) is a Researchers in Physics at IVIC.
  • Jerome “Jay” Mettetal (PhD ’08 with Alexander van Oudenaarden)
  • Sam Ocko (PhD ’15 with Mahadevan at Harvard) is now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford.
  • Michael O’Kelly (PhD ’07 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is Founder of HighlightCam, Inc.
  • Ertugrul Ozbudak (PhD ’05 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is a Professor in the Dept of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
  • Vijay Pande (PhD with Toyoichi Tanaka) is a Professor of Chemistry and Applied Physics at Stanford University.
  • Bernardo Pando (PhD ’10 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is working at Morgan Stanley in New York.
  • James Pelletier (PhD ’20 with Nikta Fakhri).
  • Nikolai Perunov (PhD’ 15 with Jeremy England) is working at Goldman Sachs.
  • Juan Pedraza (PhD ’05 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is Professor of Physics at Universidad de los Andes, Bogota.
  • Sam Rodriques (PhD ’19 with Ed Boyden)
  • Sahand Jamal Rahi (PhD ’10 with Kardar and Jaffe)
  • Nicolas Romeo (PhD ’23 with Dunkel)
  • Apratim Sahay (PhD ’15 with Alex van Oudenaarden)
  • Lawrence Saul (PhD ’94 with Mehran Kardar) is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at UCSD.
  • Rava da Silveira (PhD ’94 with Mehran Kardar) is a Permanent Member of the Research Staff at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France.
  • Michael Slutsky (PhD ’05 with Kardar and Mirny)
  • Kimani Stancil, (PhD ’02 with Kardar, Tanaka, and Feld) is a Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Howard University.
  • Tzer-Has Tan (PhD ’20 with Nikta Fakhri).
  • Mukund Thattai (PhD ’04 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is a Professor at NCBS in Bangalore.
  • Jonathan Weissman (PhD with Peter Kim) is a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and Professor at MIT.
  • Joshua Weitz (PhD ’03 with Daniel Rothman) is an Associate Professor of Biology and Physics at Georgia Tech.
  • Qiong Yang (PhD ’10 with Alex van Oudenaarden) is a Professor of Biophysics at University of Michigan.
  • Mehdi Yahyanejad (PhD ’04 with Kardar and Burge) is a Co-founder Adoptic, Inc.
  • Hyun Youk (PhD ’10 with Alexander van Oudenaarden) is a Professor in the Bionanoscience Department at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.
  • Eugene Yurtsev (PhD ’15 with Jeff Gore) is now a computational data analyst in Boston.
  • Yannan Zheng (PhD ’15 with Alexander van Oudenaarden) is a data scientist at AvantCredit in Chicago.