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Deb Sankar Banerjee

This is me.


Currently I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics in Carnegie Mellon University working with Prof. Shiladitya Banerjee. My primary research interests lie in understanding the physical principles which drive the complex and rich dynamics seen in living active matter systems. My current research activities are mainly focused on studying the formation and size regulation of intracellular structures (e.g., filaments, networks, organelles, condensates etc) and studying the collective dynamics and self-organization of active elements (e.g., growing filaments, contractile actomyosin network, cell junction etc) seen across the scales from sub-cellular cytoskeleton to supra-cellular structures and tissues. I employ various analytical and computational methods ranging from coarse grained active hydrodynamic description to stochastic reaction network and microscopic molecular dynamics simulations, to model and study biological systems

My Research

Cytoskeletal dynamics across scales:

I apply concepts from cell biology, mechanobiology and soft-condensed matter physics to understand how local actomyosin forces are organized and orchestrated from sub-cellular to supra-cellular scales to create complex (tissue) shape and dynamics. The broader goal of my research in this direction is to understand the dynamics of the elementary organizations of the actomyosin mechinary (e.g., subcellualr cortex, cellular junction etc) and to uncover the cross-talk between such organizations which drives the tissue remodelling.

alt text Possible mechanisms for the movement of actomyosin-dense structures in an active affine elastomer. Check out the work here

Self-organization of intracellular structures:

I combine ideas from statistical mechanics, cell biology and systems biology to study the design principles employed in dynamic self-organization and size-regulation of various organelles and intracellular structures. I have used chemical master equation and stochastic reaction network and hydrodynamics to describe the problems of self-organization.

Size-regulated symmetry breaking in single cells. Check out the work here

My Publications

Key Publications:

See all my publications in the Google Scholar page

Contact

Wean Hall Room: 6303
Department of Physics
Carnegie Mellon Univerity
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
United States
Email: debsankb@andrew.cmu.edu
Email: debsankar1988@gmail.com
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