Professor Yan Yu of Indiana University-Bloomington will give a seminar titled "Interrogating immune functions with engineered Janus biointerfaces" on Zoom from 4-5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 3. Everyone is welcome to attend the seminar individually via Zoom or to come to Science-Engineering Building 0203, where the seminar can be viewed in person with other attendees. The talk is free and open to the public.

Yu is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University-Bloomington. She received her B.S. in chemistry from Peking University (Beijing, China) in 2004, and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign in 2009 under the direction of Steve Granick. She completed her postdoctoral training with Jay T. Groves at the University of California at Berkeley from 2009 to 2012.

She joined the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University as an assistant professor in 2012 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2019. Yu has received many awards, including NSF CAREER award in 2016, Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in 2016, Maximizing Investigators' Research Award from the National Institutes of Health in 2017, Trustees Teaching Award from Indiana University in 2017, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017 and Invitational Fellowships for Research in Japan in 2020.

Understanding and controlling the response of immune cells holds great promise for the development of precision medicine, particularly for cancer immunotherapy. Functions of immune cells are known to depend on the intricately organized chemical reactions and physical forces. Examples range from the engulfment of invading bacteria that relies on a fine balance of competing mechanical forces, to the activation of T-lymphocytes that requires collective interactions between thousands of receptors at the junction between cells. Owing to the complexity of these processes, understanding immune functions using traditional biological tools is highly challenging.

In this talk, Yu will present her group's recent research progress toward the development of nanotechnology-based biophysical tools for the quantitative imaging and manipulation of immune cells. So far, her group's research has capitalized on Janus particles, which, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, are made chemically, biologically, optically or magnetically asymmetric. Employing a suite of Janus particle-based toolsets, they have uncovered new mechanisms in immune regulation and achieved spatiotemporal control of immune processes, from phagocytosis to intracellular trafficking, which would otherwise be difficult to access with traditional means.

To attend the seminar, please visit the Zoom link.

Meeting ID: 870 1464 3915
Passcode: jq8WX=Dg