Frank Brown Colloquium

On Friday, November 2 at 2:00 pm in the Raisler Lounge, Frank Brown of UC Santa Barbara will give a talk titled:

“Mechanics and dynamics of simulated membranes: extracting bending moduli and difficulty in the extraction of diffusion coefficients”

Abstract: 

Detailed molecular simulations are increasingly used in membrane biophysics to assist in the interpretation of experiments. However, many of the most fundamental physical properties prove difficult to accurately measure in silico due to small system sizes.  The membrane bending modulus and lateral diffusion coefficient for proteins/lipids are two such properties.  Two different stories will be presented related to the inference (or attempted inference) of these properties from simulation.

Bio:
Dr. Brown received his B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from MIT. He was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego and a Yen Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining the UCSB faculty in 2001. Dr. Brown is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.

Research in his group is entirely theoretical/computational in nature. His interests lie at the interface between physical chemistry and biophysics and he uses a variety of tools spanning the traditional fields of statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, elasticity theory and quantum mechanics in his research efforts. Recent work has focused on the dynamics and structure of biomembranes and the interpretation of various spectroscopy experiments (single molecule fluorescence, neutron spin echo, flicker spectroscopy, etc.).

Research Group Website: http://www.chem.ucsb.edu/~browngroup/