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…

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/

Energy barriers and cell migration in densely packed tissues by Dapeng Bi, J.H. Lopez, J.M. Schwarz and M. Lisa Manning will appear in Soft Matter as a communication in Feb 2014. An advanced manuscript can be viewed here here: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/sm/c3sm52893f#!divAbstract

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.