Xingbo Yang, M. Lisa Manning and M. Cristina Marchetti, “Aggregation and Segre- gation of confined active particles,” Soft Matter DOI:10.1039/C4SM00927D, (2014). Recommended with a commentary in the Journal Club for Condensed Matter.

Our manuscript was just published: R. M. Baker, M. E. Brasch, M. L. Manning, J. H. Henderson, “Automated, contour- based tracking and analysis of cell behavior over long timescales in environments of varying complexity and cell density,” in press J. Roy. Soc. Interface, doi: 10.1098/​rsif.2014.0386 (2014).  A brief synopsis: To understand how cells and tissues…

Lisa has been given a Department of Physics Excellence in Teaching award for her work in a large lecture class, Physics 211 General Physics I for scientists and Engineers for Spring 2014.

Our recent paper on energy barriers to cell migration in tissues was highlighted with a recommendation by Ludovic Berthier at the Condensed Matter Journal Club!  

Lisa Manning has been awarded a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. She is being recognized for her accomplishments, research potential, and academic leadership. The Sloan Foundation will provide $50,000 to support her research. Prof. Manning is one of only 126 early-career scientists (one of 23 physicists) in the US and Canada to receive this…

Lisa Manning gave a talk entitled, "Energy barriers and cell migration in dense tissues" at the Active Processes in Living and Nonliving Matter conference at the KITP at UC Santa Barbara on Monday, Feb 10, 2014. The talk is available here: http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/bioacter_c14/manning/

Principal Investigator Manning was awarded an NSF CAREER grant, "Flow, Failure, and Migration in Glassy Materials."  Together with graduate student Sven Wijtmans, postdoc Max Dapeng Bi and other members of the Manning group, she will use these funds to study defects in non-biological materials and cell migration in biological tissues.

Sven will be presenting a talk entitled "A New Method for Identifying Defects in Disordered Solids" at 2:42pm on Wednesday March 5 at the APS March meeting in Denver: http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR14/Event/213759 Abstract: Characterizing defects in solids is an important step to developing continuum equations for failure in materials. Defects in crystalline solids (i.e. dislocations) are easy to…

A new version of our manuscript, "A random matrix definition of the boson peak", is now available on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5904.  This new version highlights the connections between our work and Euclidean Random Matrices.  It also shows that our proposed universality class does not fall into the broad class of "Gaussian Wigner" matrices, which also…

Our paper with collaborators at UPenn and Princeton, Timon Idema, Julien O. Dubuis, Louis Kang, M. Lisa Manning, Philip C. Nelson, Tom C. Lubensky, Andrea J. Liu, "The Syncytial Drosophila Embryo as a Mechanically Excitable Medium” was recently published in PLOS ONE and is available online at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077216.