2026-27 Rising Star Lecture
Dr. Neha Kamat
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical and Biological Engineering,
Northwestern University
Wednesday, September 9
4:00 - 5:00 PM
105 Stanley Hall
“Harnessing Membrane-Protein Interactions to Engineer Synthetic and Cellular Lipid Membranes”
Abstract:
Membranes play a vital role in a variety of physiological processes. Recreating these processes outside of the cell will allow us to better understand them as well as design an entirely new class of materials that can sense, transport, or target important biological signals and molecules. In this talk, I will present our recent work harnessing lipid-protein interactions to design membrane-based nanoparticles for biosensing and therapeutic applications. Our approach, bridging synthetic biology techniques and model membrane assembly, provides an innovative yet simple method to probe the role of membrane composition and biophysical properties on protein dynamics and to advance the design of nanoparticles that leverage membrane protein activity.
Past Rising Stars
2025-26
Nicolas Fawzi
Professor of Medical Science
Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry
Brown University
"Seeing and Engineering Biomolecular Condensates with Atomic Precision”
2024-25
Jian Shu
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital,
Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, MIT
Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
“Decoding, Modeling, and Reprogramming Cells at Scale in the Era of Digital Biology”
2023-24
Ashleigh Theberge
Associate Professor of Chemistry and Adjunct Associate Professor of Urology, University of Washington
"Bioanalytical Systems for Translational Research: From Microscale Cell Culture Platforms to Biofluid Self-Sampling Tools"
2022-23
Polly Fordyce
Associate Professor of Bioengineering and of Genetics, Fellow of the ChEM-H Institute, Stanford University
"Microfluidics for High-Throughput and Quantitative Biophysics, Biochemistry, and Single-Cell Biology"
2021-22
Fei Chen
Core Member, Broad Institute, MIT
Assistant Professor, Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University
"Tissue genomics: genomic measurements in context"
View the recorded lecture
2020-21
Tim Downing
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine
PhD Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, 2013
"Synthetic Genome Regulation for Cell and Tissue Engineering"
2019-20
Krishanu Saha
Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering & Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
"Towards nonviral, in vivo genome editing therapies: new tools and models to facilitate translation"
2017-18
Stanley Qi
Stanford University
2016-17
Kim Woodrow
University of Washington
"Engineering the mucosal microenvironment promotes targeting of particulate and cellular immunotherapies to lymphoid organs"