Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
Lisa Manning, 38
Physics and biology
Syracuse University
Think of tissues as mosh pits of cells. The cells may not be able to crowd surf, but they can jam.
Specifically, cells can undergo a jamming transition, a physical role change that was previously known to occur only among foams, sand and other nonliving materials. It’s one of the ways that physicist Lisa Manning has shown how cells get physical with each other — for good and bad.
Manning, age 38, describes cells’ behavior in terms of the mechanical forces they exert on one another. Her approach has led to a new understanding of a whole host of biological processes that involve cells on the move, including embryonic development, wound healing and even asthma and cancer.
“Forces at the cellular scale are important for properties of tissues,” says physicist Jean Carlson of the University of California, Santa Barbara who was Manning’s graduate adviser. “Lisa has been a real leader in thinking that way.”
Manning first blended physics and biology in high school. She was encouraged by her physics teacher in Park Hills, Ky., Sister Mary Ethel Parrott, to try building a biochemical fuel cell, which produces energy from a microbial community. Manning created a mathematical model to figure out the sweet spot: the right amount of sugar to keep the microbes fed and the system running smoothly.
“That feeling of discovery is incredibly addictive,” Manning says. She also realized she could describe important aspects of a complex system using a fairly simple mathematical model. “That’s basically what I do today,” she says. And the benefits were more than inspirational; her efforts won first place in the engineering category at the 1998 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a program of Society for Science & the Public, which publishes Science News.
Later as a graduate student in physics, Manning studied the behavior of granular materials, collections of distinct particles. Granular materials can…
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