Nancy Roberta Forde is a Canadian biophysicist whose research involves the use of optical tweezers to probe the mechanical forces operating on biomolecules at the scale of individual molecules, including both natural materials such as collagen and artificial molecular machines. [1] [2] She is a professor and graduate chair in the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University. [3]
Forde majored in chemical physics at the University of Toronto, graduating with honours in 1994. She went to the University of Chicago for graduate study in physical chemistry, where she received a master's degree in 1995 and completed a Ph.D. in 1999 with the dissertation Intramolecular Vibrations and Electronically Nonadiabatic Dynamics in Photodissociation Reactions. [4]
After postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley and Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Berkeley, California, she joined Simon Fraser University as an assistant professor of physics in 2004. She was promoted to associate professor in 2011 and full professor in 2017. [4]
Forde was a 2018 recipient of the Michèle Auger Award for Exceptional Service of the Biophysical Society of Canada. [5] She was the 2022 recipient of Simon Fraser University's Excellence in Teaching Award, its "most prestigious award for teaching". [6]
Forde was named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2024, after a nomination from the APS Division of Biological Physics, "for contributions to the understanding of collagen mechanics and the assembly, development, and characterization of synthetic molecular motors; advances in biophysical instrumentation; and scientific leadership in the biophysics community". [1]
Carlos José Bustamante is a Peruvian-American scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Harry Eugene Stanley is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His current research focuses on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water, but he had made fundamental contributions to complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences, interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. He is one of the founding fathers of econophysics.
Michael Lawrence KleinNAS is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Science and director of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science in the college of science and technology at Temple University in Philadelphia, US. He was previously the Hepburn Professor of Physical Science in the Center for Molecular Modeling at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rama Bansil serves as Professor of Physics at Boston University, a post she has held since 1997. Although trained as a physicist, her work and professional associations are multi-disciplined, with areas of expertise encompassing biopolymer engineering, polymer engineering, photonics, nanoscience, nanobiotechnology, biophysics and biochemistry.
Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently emeritus James R. Eiszner Chair in Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Judith P. Klinman is an American chemist, biochemist, and molecular biologist known for her work on enzyme catalysis. She became the first female professor in the physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, where she is now Professor of the Graduate School and Chancellor's Professor. In 2012, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society.
Nancy Makri is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is the principal investigator of the Makri Research Group for the theoretical understanding of condensed phase quantum dynamics. She studies theoretical quantum dynamics of polyatomic systems, and has developed methods for long-time numerical path integral simulations of quantum dissipative systems.
Andrea Jo-Wei Liu is the Hepburn Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry. She is a theoretical physicist studying condensed matter physics and biophysics. She is particularly known for her study of jamming, a phenomenon in which disordered materials become rigid with increasing density and stress. She is a Simons Investigator and Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics, fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Gregory A. Voth is a theoretical chemist and Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor of the James Franck Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.
Sarah L. Keller is an American biophysicist, studying problems at the intersection between biology and chemistry. She investigates self-assembling soft matter systems. Her current main research focus is understanding how simple lipid mixtures within bilayer membranes give rise to membrane's complex phase behavior.
Chris H. Greene is an American physicist and the Albert Overhauser Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.
Christopher Jarzynski is an American physicist and distinguished university professor at University of Maryland's department of chemistry and biochemistry, department of physics, and institute for physical science and technology, and fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He is known for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, for which he was awarded the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize. In 1997, he derived the now famous Jarzynski equality, confirmation of which was cited by the Nobel Committee for Physics as an application of one of the winning inventions of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics—optical tweezers.
James L. Skinner is an American theoretical chemist. He is the Joseph O. and Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder Professor Emeritus at the University Wisconsin-Madison. Until 2024 he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Welch Foundation. Until 2020, Skinner was the Crown Family Professor of Molecular Engineering, professor of chemistry, director of the Water Research Initiative and deputy dean for faculty affairs of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Skinner is recognized for his contributions to the fields of theoretical chemistry, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, linear and nonlinear spectroscopy of liquids, amorphous and crystalline solids, surfaces, proteins, and supercritical fluids. Skinner is the co-author of over 230 peer-reviewed research articles.
Kandice Tanner is a Trinidad and Tobago biophysicist researching the metastatic traits that allow tumor cells to colonize secondary organs. She is a Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, where she is head of the Tissue morphodynamics section.
Michelle Dong Wang is a Chinese-American physicist who is the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences at Cornell University. She is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research considers biomolecular motors and single molecule optical trapping techniques. She was appointed Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009 and the Biophysical Society in 2024.
Marjorie Ann Olmstead is an American condensed matter physicist.
Shirley Chiang is an American microscopist focused on the high-resolution imaging of surfaces, including the use of scanning tunneling microscopy and low-energy electron microscopy, and known for capturing the first image showing the ring structure of benzene molecules. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis, in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and editor-in-chief of the MDPI journal Nanomaterials.
Connie Barbara Roth is a Canadian-American soft matter physicist and polymer scientist whose research concerns the glass transition and aging in polymer films. She is a professor of physics at Emory University.
Kinneret Keren is an Israeli biophysicist and nanotechnologist whose research has involved the biology-based self-assembly of molecular electronics using DNA as a template, as well as the movement of biological cells, pattern formation, and morphogenesis in biology and synthetic biology. She is a faculty member in the Department of Physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.