David R. Nelson '72, Ph.D. '75, the Mary Shepard B. Upson Visiting Professor at Cornell and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University, will present the Henri Sack Memorial Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 14, at 7 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall. His lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled "Polymers and Biophysics."
Nelson's research focuses on collective effects in the physics and chemistry of condensed matter. He has been interested, in particular, in the interplay between fluctuations, geometry and statistical mechanics. His current interests include vortex physics, the statistical mechanics of polymers, topological defects on frozen topographies and biophysics.
A recent revolution in polymer science and biophysics has led to the use of exquisitely sensitive tools to probe polymeric ingredients of DNA and RNA, one molecule at a time, Nelson says. In his lecture, which is sponsored by the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell, Nelson will discuss the central role played by entropic elasticity and experiments with force-induced unzipping of DNA. He also will address flexible polymerized or "tethered" membranes, which are natural generalizations of these linear polymer chains, and the spectrin skeleton of red blood cells.
Nelson is the recipient of many awards, including the Bardeen Prize, Harvard Ledlie Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Prize Fellowship.
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