Sarah Veatch

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Sarah Louise Veatch is an American biophysicist, associate professor of biophysics at University of Michigan.

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Sarah Louise Veatch
Born
Brookline, Massachusetts
NationalityAmerican
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Washington
Scientific career
FieldsBiophysics
Institutions University of Michigan

Early life

Veatch was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts by her mother, a medical doctor, and her father, William R. Veatch, a membrane biophysicist. [1]

Education

Veatch's interest in physics began in high school. She was involved in her high school's gay–straight alliance in the mid-1990s "but struggled with her LGBT identity until college". [2] She earned a B.S. in physics in 1998 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [1] [3] Her undergraduate thesis was titled VLF magnetic field correlation measurements between LIGO sites. Her thesis supervisor was Rainer Weiss. [4]

Veatch worked for a year as an electrical engineer, programming lighting consoles used in auditoriums. In 2004, she completed her Ph.D. in physics at University of Washington under her advisor Sarah L. Keller, after which she conducted one year of postdoctoral studies with Robert E. W. Hancock at University of British Columbia. She also worked with Jenifer Thewalt at Simon Fraser University. Veatch completed further postdoctoral studies with Barbara A. Baird and David Holowka at Cornell University. Here, she built upon her Ph.D. work, exploring phase separation in isolated biological membranes. [1]

Career

After her postdoctoral work, Veatch was hired as an Assistant Professor of Biophysics at the University of Michigan, [1] and was promoted to the position of associate professor in May 2017. [5] She researches the physical properties of lipids and the influence on the plasma membrane function. [6] She investigates signalling pathways initiated in the membrane and has developed new super-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques to further study interactions in the membrane. [7]

Veatch is a Presidential Visiting Fellow of Yale University 2019-2020 where she is working on ion channel function and phase transitions in membranes and polymers alongside Ben Machta. [7]

Awards and honors

In 2012, Veatch won a Sloan Research Fellowship. [6] In 2014, she was awarded the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award "for her substantial contributions to the field of membrane physical chemistry as it translates into biological systems." [8]

She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023, "for foundational work in understanding the miscibility phase transition and associated critical phenomena in membranes, and for rigorously applying these physical concepts to biological processes". [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biophysics</span> Study of biological systems using methods from the physical sciences

Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. Biophysical research shares significant overlap with biochemistry, molecular biology, physical chemistry, physiology, nanotechnology, bioengineering, computational biology, biomechanics, developmental biology and systems biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Oakley Dayhoff</span> American biophysicist

Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff was an American Biophysicist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM). The one-letter code used for amino acids was developed by her, reflecting an attempt to reduce the size of the data files used to describe amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biophysical Society</span>

The Biophysical Society is an international scientific society whose purpose is to lead the development and dissemination of knowledge in biophysics. Founded in 1958, the Society currently consists of over 7,000 members in academia, government, and industry. Although the Society is based in the United States, it is an international organization. Overseas members currently comprise over one third of the total.

The Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society in Rockville, Maryland, is given to a woman who "holds very high promise or has achieved prominence while developing the early stages of a career in biophysical research". It is "one of the top national honors" in biophysics. The award was established in 1984 in honor of Margaret Dayhoff, a biophysicist associated with the Biophysical Society and the National Biomedical Research Foundation.

Charles L. Brooks III is an American theoretical and computational biophysicist. He is the Cyrus Levinthal Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry and Biophysics, the Warner-Lambert/Park-Davis Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Biophysics and Chair of Biophysics at the University of Michigan.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara E. Ehrlich</span> American biologist and academic (born 1952)

Barbara E. Ehrlich is Professor of Pharmacology and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University working on the biophysics of membrane ion channels. Recent research investigates the function of polycystin-2, the inositol trisphosphate receptor, and the ryanodine receptor.

Robin M. Queen is an American sociolinguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. In 2010 she was named a Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Linguistics, English Languages and Literatures, and Germanic Languages and Literatures. She served as the Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan from 2014-2021 and the Chair of the Department of Communication and Media from 2022-2024. In 2024 she was named the Sarah Thomason Collegiate Professor of Linguistics.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christine Aidala</span> American high-energy nuclear physicist

Christine Angela Aidala is an American high-energy nuclear physicist, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. She studies nucleon structure and parton dynamics in quantum chromodynamics.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah L. Keller</span> American biophysicist

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.

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Laura B. Eisenstein (1942–1985) was a professor in the physics department at the University of Illinois until her early death. Eisenstein was known for her contributions to the understanding of light-energy transduction mechanisms in biological molecules and their higher order assemblies. She was an experimentalist and spectroscopist who was particularly well known for her contributions applying the techniques of x-ray absorption spectroscopy and time-resolved resonance Raman spectroscopy to the study of biomolecules. These studies indicated that phenomena such as quantum-mechanical tunnelling can be successfully investigated even in soft-matter systems like proteins.

Jennifer L. Ross is an American physicist who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics at Syracuse University. Her research considers active biological condensed matter physics. She was elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018 and American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.

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Julie Suzanne Biteen is a Canadian-born American chemist who is professor of chemistry and biophysics at the University of Michigan. Her research considers the development of imaging systems for biological systems. She was named the Stanford University Sessler Distinguished Alumni Lecturer in 2021.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Sarah Veatch". The Biophysical Society. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  2. ↑ "Where are all the LGBT scientists? Sexuality and gender identity in science | www.scienceinschool.org". www.scienceinschool.org. Retrieved 2020-02-26.
  3. ↑ Unsay, Joseph D. (2017-03-27). "Where are all the LGBT scientists? Sexuality and gender identity in science". Science in School. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  4. ↑ Veatch, Sarah Louise (1998). "VLF magnetic field correlation measurements between LIGO sites". library.mit.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  5. ↑ "A Milestone for UofM Biophysics! | U-M LSA Biophysics". lsa.umich.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-26.
  6. 1 2 "Two U-M early-career scientists win 2012 Sloan research fellowships". University of Michigan News. 2012-02-16. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  7. 1 2 "Presidential Visiting Fellow 2019-2020 | Department of Physics". physics.yale.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-26.
  8. ↑ "Congratulations to Prof. Sarah Veatch as she has received the 2014 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award for her substantial contributions to the field of membrane physical chemistry as it translates into biological systems! | U-M LSA Biophysics". lsa.umich.edu. 2013-08-07. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  9. ↑ "2023 Fellows". APS Fellow Archive. American Physical Society. Retrieved 2023-10-19.
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