Christoph Haselwandter
Research & Practice Areas
Please see http://www.haselwandterlab.com for further details.
Biography
Christoph A. Haselwandter studied physics and mathematics at Imperial College London and at the University of Cambridge, and obtained his doctorate from Imperial College London on the physics of semiconductor surfaces (Advisor: D. D. Vvedensky). Subsequently, Dr. Haselwandter held appointments in the Condensed Matter Theory Group at MIT as an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow (Advisor: M. Kardar) and in the Physical Biology of the Cell Group at Caltech (Advisor: R. Phillips), before joining the University of Southern California, where he is part of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology. Doctor Haselwandter’s research focuses on the theoretical physics of biological systems. His many awards and honors for research, teaching, and service include the Outstanding Referee Award of the American Physical Society, the CAREER Award of the US National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics, the Armstrong Medal & Prize, the Valerie Myerscough Prize, the Tyndall Prize, and the Tessella Prize for Software.
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
The Haselwandter group explores the basic physical mechanisms and principles underlying life, with particular emphasis on the organization, dynamics, shape, and signaling properties of cell membranes. This research program is motivated by the prospect that a physical understanding of the organizational principles underlying life will yield new fundamental insights into nature, and that a physical understanding of biological function will also suggest novel approaches for the control and quantitative analysis of living systems.