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 work—and help heal injured tissues or treat diseases such as cancer—researchers need to track cell motion. As researchers study larger numbers of cells for longer times in increasingly complex environments, it has it has become difficult to track individual cells and characterize their properties. Here a team from Syracuse University presents a new, automated approach that accurately tracks cells in complex benchtop experiments. It also identifies subtle differences in cell motion that could be important for disease progression or biomaterials design, enabling a new generation of experiments across many research fields.

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 recognition this year (see here or p. 9 of the Feb 18th issue of the NY Times for a list).

A news article about the award is available: http://news.syr.edu/physics-professor-lisa-manning-named-sloan-research-fellow-79757/

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 characterize, but in disordered solids the lack of crystalline order makes it difficult to identify where particle rearrangements are likely to occur. Recently, vibrational modes have been used to identify flow defects or “soft spots” in disordered solids. However, the algorithm contains several free parameters that are difficult to constrain and does not provide detailed information about the nature of the defects. Here we describe a new method for identifying defects. We add spring-like interactions between coarse-grained grid points, thereby suppressing long wavelength sound modes. This allows us to identify the energy barriers and precise displacements corresponding to defects, and potentially avoids systematic effects generated by elastic interactions between defects. Plastic events do occur at defect locations, and are correlated with the defect energy barriers.  We find that the energy barriers of defects are significantly lower that the energy barriers for the eigenvectors.

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 have a surprsing universality, that have recently been studied by mathematicians like Terry Tao.

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.