Lab Data Management Specialist at Syracuse University

The Manning research lab (https://mmanning.expressions.syr.edu/ ) at Syracuse University is looking to hire a full-time Data Management Specialist.  We’re looking for an individual with a bachelor’s degree in library & information science, information management technology, or a related field to help us manage the data our research lab uses and generates. Specifically, we’re looking for someone to join our team who will participate in the entire research, software, data, and publication workflow (organization and process management throughout the research lifecycle) of the lab.  Duties include revamping the lab’s data management plan, developing a common literature citation workflow and training students, developing and helping to implement a social media communication strategy, and possibly revamping software management policy. We expect this to be a great CV-building opportunity to work with an active, award-winning academic research group, and help us better execute our mission to train students and contribute to problems with real-world impact, ranging from design of materials to cancer and congenital disease. Our research group is diverse and understands that diversity enhances our ability to do the best science.  We actively seek applicants who can continue to broaden that diversity and contribute to an inclusive lab culture.

Please see the official job posting for additional details: https://www.sujobopps.com/postings/89165

For questions about the position, feel free to contact Prof. Manning at (mmanning@syr.edu)

Well, the pandemic put quite a damper on us publishing group news on our website. Despite appearances, since the last post we’ve published a lot of exciting work. Congratulations to all of our students, postdocs, and collaborators on making progress in difficult times! Here’s the 8 papers that we’ve published in the last year or so:

Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan and M. L. Manning. Effect of cellular rearrangement time delays on the rheology of vertex models for confluent tissues, PLOS Comp. Bio 17(6): e1009049, https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.100904 BioRXiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.13.431087 (2021).

Peter K. Morse, Sudeshna Roy, Elisabeth Agoritsas, Ethan Stanifer, Eric I. Corwin, M. Lisa Manning. “A direct link between active matter and sheared granular systems,” accepted to PNAS, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07706 (2020). 

John Devany, Daniel M. Sussman, Takaki Yamamoto, M. Lisa Manning, Margaret L. Gardel, “Cell division Rate Controls Cell Shape Remodeling in Epithelia,”  PNAS https://www.pnas.org/content/118/10/e1917853118, on BioRXiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/804294 (2021).

Steffen Grosser, Jürgen Lippoldt, Linda Oswald, Matthias Merkel, Daniel M. Sussman, Frédéric Renner, Pablo Gottheil, Erik W. Morawetz, Thomas Fuhs, Xiaofan Xie, Steve Pawlizak, Anatol W. Fritsch, Benjamin Wolf, Lars-Christian Horn, Susanne Briest, Bahriye Aktas, M. Lisa Manning, and Josef A. Käs. “Cell and Nucleus Shape as an Indicator of Tissue Fluidity in Carcinoma,”  Physical Review X https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.011033 (2021).

David Richard* Geert Kapteijns* Julia A. Giannini, M. Lisa Manning, and Edan Lerner, “A simple and broadly-applicable definition of shear transformation zones,” accepted to Phys. Rev. Lett., https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.08181 (2020).

Diogo E. P. Pinto, Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan, M. Lisa Manning, and Nuno A. M. Araujo. “The cell adaptation time sets a minimum length scale for patterned substrates,” Biophysical Journal 119,11 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2020.10.026, https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01518 (2020).

D. Richard, M. Ozawa, S. Patinet, E. Stanifer, B. Shang, S. Ridout, B. Xu, G. Zhang, P. Morse, J.-L. Barrat, L. Berthier, M.L. Falk, P. Guan, A. Liu, K. Martens, S. Sastry, D. Vandembroucq, E. Lerner, and M.L. Manning. “Predicting plasticity in disordered solids from structural indicators,” Physical Review Materials 4, 113609 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.4.113609arXiv:2003.11629 (2020).

Peter Morse, Merlijn van Deen, Sven Wijtmans, Martin Van Hecke, M. L. Manning, “Two classes of events in sheared particulate matter,”  Physical Review Research 2 023179, https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.023179arXiv:1907.10198 (2020).

Congratulations to Dr. Ethan Stanifer, who successfully defended his thesis entitled, “Investigating the relationships between disorder, structure, and dynamics in amorphous systems” on June 25th!

As a research lab, we have taken time away from work for #shutdownSTEM and Juneteenth reflect on how we can actively promote anti-racism. We must start by acknowledging that BlackLivesMatter and that systemic racism negatively impacts people of color in many ways, including raising significant barriers that impede them as they perform scientific research and progress in academia.  We love doing science, and all people deserve that thrill of discovery. How many great scientists are we missing because systemic racism blocked them from that path?Moreover, research demonstrates that science and engineering are better when science is more diverse: https://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385 . And there are plenty of examples of times when science and technology has failed us because the scientists/designers were not diverse: https://reporter.rit.edu/tech/bigotry-encoded-racial-bias-technology .Given this, we must take active steps to make our research group and society more inclusive, and very specific more inclusive of Black and Brown students and scientists. Small steps include expanding our work on partnerships between Minority Serving Institutions and Primarily White Institutions, contributing to the Physics Department’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and advocating for changes to GRE and other departmental testing requirements. We can ensure that the speakers we invite to give seminars are diverse, and we can participate in mentoring and outreach programs.  We can engage in public policy debates as private citizens. This is a process, so we are still engaged in thinking about changes we can make to improve. Please stay tuned.

A great collaboration with Karen Kasza’s group at Columbia has led to a paper we’re excited about that just appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our former REU (research experiences for undergraduates) student Leo Sutter is a co-author, as are former postdocs Matthias Merkel and Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan. Here’s a link to a news article about the research : https://thecollege.syr.edu/news-all/news-2020/physics-behind-tissue-growth-embryo/
And here’s a link to the manuscript: Xun Wang*, Matthias Merkel*, Leo B. Sutter*, Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan, M. Lisa Manning, Karen E. Kasza. “A solid-to-fluid transition is predicted by cell shape and alignment in an anisotropic tissue of the developing fly embryo”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2020, 201916418 , https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916418117 , arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07283 (2020).

Former postdoctoral associate Peter Morse, former graduate student Sven Wijtmans, and Lisa Manning worked with Martin Van Hecke’s lab to understand how contact changes correlate with plasticity in jammed soft spheres.  We found that contact changes are not one-to-one with plastic events, even in the limit of zero pressure. This is interesting because in hard spheres those two types of events always occur together.  We also show that the statistics of nonlinear plastic events show the same scaling as the linear response, again highlighting the zero-pressure limit is singular.

Peter Morse, Merlijn van Deen, Sven Wijtmans, Martin Van Hecke, M. L. Manning, “Two classes of events in sheared particulate matter,”  Physical Review Research 2 023179, https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.023179 arXiv:1907.10198 (2020).

Former postdoctoral associate Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan and Lisa Manning worked with Heidi Hehnly’s lab (SU Biology) and Jeff Amack’s lab (SUNY Upstate Cell and Developmental Biology) to understand cytokinetic bridges that occur during formation of Kupffer’s vesicle, the organ responsible for left-right symmetry breaking in zebrafish. The manuscript recently appeared in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15002-8

Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy dynamics in some epithelial layers despite continued cell cycling. To address this discrepancy, we quantify the role of cell birth and death on glassy states in confluent tissues using simulations of an active vertex model that includes cell motility, cell division, and cell death. Our simulation data is consistent with a simple ansatz in which the rate of cell-life cycling and the rate of relaxation of the tissue in the absence of cell cycling contribute independently and additively to the overall rate of cell motion. Specifically, we find that a glass-like regime with caging behavior indicated by subdiffusive cell displacements can be achieved in systems with sufficiently low rates of cell cycling.

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/sm/c9sm00916g#!divAbstract