Research Collaborations

COLLABORATION CLUSTERS:

Cell Cluster
Lung Cluster
Thrombosis Cluster

Our collaborators form the heart of our Resource: they present the driving problems that steer our technology development. We appreciate expert force scientists that contribute directly to our technology and point out new opportunities. We delight in naïve users because they present opportunities for broadening the impact of our work in new fields, and because their demands are often more extraordinary and therefore challenge us in entirely new ways.

The research work of our collaborators is biomedically important, as many of the projects bear directly on disease. This is most obvious in the collaboration projects on Lung Surfactant Rheology for neonatal respiratory distress, the Mechanics of Cancer Cells, Virtual Lung Project and Mucociliary Clearance (Cystic Fibrosis), and Clot Properties and Deep Vein Thrombosis, with the last two having a translational component for patient studies. Basic science linking molecular scale details to macroscopic consequences are pursued in 1) Single Fibrin Fiber Mechanics that correlates fibrin primary sequence with clot mechanical properties and in 2) the Force Activation Pathways in Drosophila, which is motivated by the biochemical network that is responsible for embryogenesis. Three patient studies are grouped into a Medical Cluster with two of them using new visualizations strategies for understanding joint imaging and for tumor detection in MRI spectroscopy imaging. The intellectual connections among the Resource collaborations are also remarkable as evidenced by their natural grouping into clusters.