Emilie Oakes is joining our group over the summer as part of the SBI REU program!

There is at least one and possibly two postdoctoral positions available in the Manning group beginning in Fall 2015 or Winter 2016.  Please email Lisa or see advertisement on the Welcome page for more info.

Giuseppe Passucci passed his oral research exam, setting the stage for him completing his Ph. D. in physics.  Congratulations, Giuseppe!

The Syracuse University Board of Trustees has approved the Provost’s decision that Lisa Manning be granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.

Manning’s proposed work, “Using Single-Cell Mechanical Properties to Predict Pattern Formation and Mechanical Response in Biological Tissues” will be funded over three years. Cottrell Scholar Awards (15 awarded annually in the sciences throughout the country) recognize early career faculty with exceptional potential in both research and academic leadership: http://rescorp.org/news/2015/02/rcsa-directors-approve-48-research-awards http://rescorp.org/cottrell-scholars

Our paper on extracting force chains in granular materials using methods from network theory has just been published as an advance article in Soft Matter.  An image from our work will also appear on the front cover! Danielle S. Bassett, Eli T. Owens, Mason A. Porter, M. Lisa Manning, Karen E. Daniels. “Practical Methods for…

Link to manuscript: M. L. Manning and A. J. Liu, “A random matrix definition of the boson peak,” accepted to Europhysics Letters, arXiv:1307.5904 (2015) An old theory by Debye predicts that the number of sound modes in a crystal increases as the frequency of the sound mode to the power (d-1), where d is the…

Giuseppe Passucci is giving an invited soundbite at the NY Complex Matter workshop. Max Dapeng Bi will be giving an invited talk at the APS March Meeting in San Antonio in a symposium entitled “Mechanical interactions and pattern formation in multicellular systems” on 3/6/15 starting at 11:15am. Lisa Manning will be giving an invited talk…

The Syracuse Soft Matter Program presents a public Lecture  "The sound of disorder" featuring: Lisa Manning, Assistant Professor at Syracuse University Wednesday, October 29, 2014 7:00 p.m.  Watson Theater Abstract:  You are familiar with liquid-to-solid transitions — if you cool down water, it will turn into ice.   This large-scale observation is related to the microscopic…

We just posted a very exciting new paper on the arXiv:1409.0593! This work, pioneered by first author Max Dapeng Bi, shows that the vertex model, which has been widely and successfully used to describe cell shapes and statistics in biological tissues, has an unexpected rigidity transition.  This transition, instead of being controlled by the cell…