Dr. Charles Wolgemuth

 

    Charles Wolgemuth is a professor at the University of Arizona, where he also received his PhD. in Physics. He currently works in the Physics department as well as the Molecular and Cellular Biology department, with his area of study being Biological Physics. Before he worked as a professor at the University of Arizona, he worked at UC Berkeley and then the University of Connecticut Health Center in the Richard D. Berlin Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling. 

    His research revolves around "determin[ing] the mechanisms by which cells produce the force necessary to create and maintain their shape, grow and move". His thesis was about competing helical structures in bacterial flagellum, though his research now emphasizes how motility occurs in cells. Right now he is focusing on two main projects. The first is how Lyme disease, caused by a spirochete bacteria, is spread via the motility of the bacterium. This is important because, as Wolgemuth writes, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease has previously only been studied "in fluid media or gel-like media to which the spirochete is unable to adhere", so it is very likely that how it moves during pathogenesis is very different to what researchers have previously observed. This research might help to better understand the transmission of Lyme disease, which is still a very real health problem in the United States. 

    The second main project that Wolgemuth is focusing on is "constructing quantitative models for cell motility [that] will require untangling the physics of the cytoskeleton from the action of molecular motors". His research is important because, as Wolgemuth writes, "the mechanism by which force is generated to drive translocation of the cell body is still debated" as it does not appear to be entirely due to motor proteins. Wolgemuth researches this motion by studying a type of cell that is able to 'crawl' without any motor proteins. 

    In addition to these two specific projects, another of Wolgemuth's research questions is how "single cell crawling and cell-cell interactions lead to the complex bulk migration that is observed during wound healing and cancer metastasis"; while there are no specific projects assigned to this question yet, this might be an extension of his project that looks at the physics behind motor-less movement. 

Sources: 

https://w3.physics.arizona.edu/people/charles-wolgemuth

https://physics.aps.org/authors/charles_w_wolgemuth

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.1631

http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~wolg/research.html