Events
SEMS seminars: Prof Guillaume Charras, UCL
Centre for Bioengineering
Date: 19 February 2025 Time: 15:00 - 16:00 
Location: SEMS Seminar Room, 3rd floor, Engineering Building
About the speaker
After an undergraduate degree in Physics and Engineering in Paris, Prof Charras became fascinated by Cell Biology and turned my research interests to Biophysics. Prof Charras was fortunate to be exposed to many facets of Bioengineering and Biophysics through Masters degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and through PhD work at UCL. During this time, Prof. Charras worked in the general area of cell mechanics using experimental techniques such as AFM and electrophysiology as well as computational simulation techniques, all of which remain key to lab's present research.
Prof Charras then decided to do a post-doc in a Cell Biology lab to acquire training in molecular cell biology techniques in Harvard Medical school. There, Prof. Charras was fortunate to be exposed to the fearless experimentators of the Mitchison lab, first in the department of Cell Biology and then in the department of Systems Biology. During this time, Prof. Charras worked primarily on blebbing and the cell cortex, at the time a rather obscure topic. This still forms one of the research directions in laboratory and has many connections to other parts of the lab's research. While in Boston, a chance encounter with microfluidics led to start working on cell migration in confined environments in collaboration with Daniel Irimia at MGH.
Since establishing laboratory at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, research has generally focused on cell and tissue mechanics with a focus on the cytoskeleton. However, Prof. Charras curious about many aspects of Cell and Developmental Biology and often venture into other areas than main focus. Prof Charras lab's research borrows concepts and tools from Physics and Engineering to answer fundamental questions in Cell and Developmental Biology.
Updated by: Zion Tse