Goldstein Lab

Funding

Our Research at the University of Cambridge is supported by a number of sources. Chief among them is the Schlumberger Corporation, through its generous endowment of the Schlumberger Chair of Complex Physical Systems and the Schlumberger Chair Fund.

Grants currently funding work in the group include:

We have an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council for research into "Physical Aspects of the Evolution of Biological Complexity." This five year, €2.5 million project is aimed at understanding fundamental issues in cell specialization and transport that accompany transitions to multicellular life, and involves a multidisciplinary effort combining cell and molecular biology, genetics, evolutionary biology, plant science, physics, and fluid dynamics.

A grant from the Mathematics programme of the EPSRC (co-PIs Dr. Adriana I. Pesci and Prof. H.K. Moffatt) funds our study of "Dynamics of Topological Transitions of Soap Films Spanning Deformable Contours". This work is motivated by experimental observations regarding singularity formation when one minimal surface evolves to another, as in the collapse of a soap film Mobius strip evolving to a two-sided film. Many interesting mathematical and physical questions arise in this little-studied class of free-boundary problems.

We have recently been awarded a Senior Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust for the project "Synchronization of Cilia". This 5-year award will allow us to focus on developing the study of synchronization of eukaryotic cilia and flagella into a quantitative science. Much of the research will use as model organisms members of the Volvocine green algae, whose flagella are extremely close in structure to mammalian cilia.

Some aquatic bacteria can make intracellular chambers (made entirely of protein) that are permeable only to environmental gasses. Known as gas vesicles they form conglomerates (gas vacuoles) easily seen in phase contrast microscopy. Aquatic bacteria that make GVs use them for buoyancy, allowing upward flotation in a static water column. This can be useful for photosynthetic bacteria that need to rise in a stratified aquatic niche to access light, or to acquire nutrients, or escape predators. A joint project with Prof. George Salmond (Biochemistry, Cambridge), recently supported by the BBSRC, involves understanding the interplay between the biology and physics of this quorum-sensing-regulated process.

We are grateful to the agencies below for prior research support