The World Traveler Biophysicist: Sonia Contera

 

Physicist Sonia Contera has an impressive background that includes studying all over the world and knowing over three different languages. She graduated class of 1993 from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain where she majored in Physics. Next, she traveled to Beijing to study at Beijing Languages and Culture University to complete graduate school. She was awarded the Japanese Government Monbushō scholarship, so she traveled to Japan and obtained her PhD from Osaka University. She then became a professor working in Japan, Denmark, and finally has been at Oxford University for the last seventeen years. Don’t think she just settled down in London because she has worked at Oxford for a long time as she continues to work in labs all over the world from South Africa to Russia. She is the Associate Head of the Physics Department at Oxford and is the chair for Equality, Diversity & Inclusion. Her interest lies in combining all sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and engineering) to progress nanotechnology. Her interest motivated her to create the Oxford Martin Institute of Nanoscience for Medicine which focused on studying nano-antibiotics, nano-biomaterials and drug delivery mechanisms. Sadly, the grant for the program ended in 2013, but Contera has been busy working on many projects since then simultaneously. 

Contera recently finished collaborating on three publicly funded projects where two of the projects focused on the physics of plants and the other project used biophysical techniques for therapy of traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries. Her first plant project focused on multifrequency mapping of cells on plant walls to deduce the cells’ elastic and vicious mechanical properties. In class, we had just finished talking about diffusion, and her first project shows a practical application of how diffusion rates among the plant cell are important as they affect cell signaling, enzymatic reactions and cellular metabolism. Her second plant project also focused on physical mechanisms in plant cell walls but investigated how the growth of those plant cells are centered at the individual cell level. In this project, I found it very interesting how individual cells are different, yet the final overall form say of flower petals on the same plant are all the same shape. Although all her projects are super neat, I am most interested in her last project that changed the state of neurons by using ultrasounds which is similar to how general anesthetics are used. The mechanism for controlling these neurons is not well known and that’s what her study tried to learn more about. Her lab focuses on the integration of physics and biology where physics can help eliminate how biological systems function. She believes “biology is undergoing a profound transformation. The adequacy of the reductionist approach to explain life solely by the interactions of its molecular actors (genes and proteins) is being challenged by a new generation of scientists armed with the tools of physics who are embracing biology's emergent complexity in all its scales and manifestations.”

For more information, check out her Twitter 🙂: https://twitter.com/SONIACONTERA?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

References: 

https://conteralab.web.ox.ac.uk/home

https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/antoranzcontera

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31357005/

https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FP01979X%2F1