Awarded in 2013
Home Department: Chemical Engineering
Faculty Advisors: Andrew Spakowitz (Chemical Engineering) and Aaron Straight (Biochemistry)

Research Title: Physical modeling of particle and chromosome dynamics in living cells”

Research Description: Inside living cells, genomic DNA is densely packed into a space roughly a thousand times smaller than its unconstrained length and highly crowded by other macromolecules. At the same time, the information stored in the DNA sequence must be well-organized and accessible for the cell to grow and carry out its functions. Tom is interested in developing physical models that describe the motion and organization of DNA in this highly compact environment. His goal is to use these models to better understand fundamental biophysical processes such as chromosome segregation and how distant regions of DNA are able to find one another during recombination events.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Thomas is an Applied Science Manager at Uber.