Email: gardel@mit.edu Phone: (617) 452-3894 Address: Department of Physics Room 13-2042 MIT 77 Mass. Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 Related Links: The van Oudenaarden Biophysics Lab @ MIT 2005-06 Pappalardo Fellows Biographies Area of Physics: Biophysics

Research Interests

Margaret Gardel's research interests lie in understanding how living cells sense and generate mechanical forces. The mechanical properties of cells are determined by a dynamic polymer network called the cytoskeleton. Cell division and motility require the generation of mechanical forces in the cytoskeleton at micron length scales. Mechanisms of cytoskeletal force generation at molecular length scales include motor proteins and the polymerization of rigid filaments. While the qualitative features of these two mechanisms of force generation are understood, very little is known about how local forces are transduced to induce contractile or protrusive forces in the cytoskeleton at micron length scales.

Living cells can also sense changes in the external mechanical environment. Gardel is interested in understanding how these external mechanical signals are sensed by the cell and are converted to chemical signals to regulate cell activity.

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Biographical Sketch

Gardel earned her Ph.D. in the spring of 2004 at Harvard University in Experimental Soft Condensed Matter with Prof. David Weitz. The primary focus of her thesis was probing the origins of the elasticity of Actin Networks. In 1998, she received her undergraduate degree in Physics and Math from Brown University. From 1998-99, Gardel was an assistant coach with Brown Women's Crew.

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Selected Publications

M.L. Gardel, M.T. Valentine, J.C. Crocker, A.R. Bausch, and D.A. Weitz, "Microrheology of Entangled F-actin Solutions", PRL 91 158302 (2003).

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