Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Jasmine A. Nirody
University of California, Berkeley

Citation:

"Outstanding thesis work on investigating the molecular mechanism underlying the dynamics of bacterial flagellar motor by using both computational modeling methods and experiments."

Background:

Jasmine Nirody received her B.A. in mathematics and biology from New York University in 2008 and her Ph.D. from the Biophysics Graduate Group at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017 under the mentorship of George Oster. In her dissertation, titled “Talking about a revolution: the dynamics of the rotary motor of bacterial flagella”, she used modeling, computation, and experiment to understand how the bacterial flagellar motor converts electrochemical energy to mechanical torque in order to propel bacterial swimming. At Berkeley, she was funded by a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Fellowship from the Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (CiBER) and a Moore/Sloan Foundation Data Science Fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). Broadly, she is interested in studying motion in fluids, particularly to understand the challenges associated with successfully moving and navigating in fluid environments across scales and the adaptations and strategies that have evolved to overcome them. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College, at the University of Oxford, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Fellow at the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at The Rockefeller University. At Oxford, she works primarily in Richard Berry’s group in the Department of Physics, using a range of experimental techniques to investigate several fundamental properties of the flagellar.


Selection Committee:

2018 Selection Committee Members: Yuhai Tu (Chair), Erin Rericha, Eva-Maria Schoetz Collins, Kandice Tanner