Moumita (Mo) Das

Low key lab dinner last night to celebrate Keegan’s successful MS thesis defense and Youssof’s successuful PhD 2nd year presentation. Action shots from Youssof’s talk earlier in the day.

My Physics MS mentee Keegan Tonry defended their thesis today with a clear, thorough talk on spatiotemporal restructuring in active cytoskeletal composites. It’s been great to see them grow and thrive as a researcher and bring this work to fruition. Congrats, Keegan!

At the Hactive Matter 2025 Workshop (Hackathon) at UCSB, with my collaborators Rae Robertson-Anderson, Megan Valentine, Ryan McGorty and student/postdoc participants

Please join BPPB on Friday July 18 at 11 US Eastern time for talks by Lailai Zhu (Endowing Intelligence in Bionic Active Particles) and Sohan Kale (Mapping Cellular Tractions on Nanonets). For more information and to join our email list, please visit sites.google.com/view/bppb-se....

Just wrapped up 5 intense days at an NIH Innovation Lab on synthetic biology + cancer initiation. Hadn’t been in one in 4 years, forgot how stimulating they can be. Nothing like the thrill of bold, cross-disciplinary ideas with scientists you’ve just met—who may well become your new collaborators

I’ve recently stepped into the role of Director of our Physics PhD program. Colleagues who’ve served as PhD Program Directors or DGS — I’d love your thoughts on what worked, what didn’t, and what you wish you’d known starting out. Comment, email, or tell me next time we talk (in person or on Zoom).

An Informal Overview of US Science Funding How does public funding for science work in the United States? How much money is there? Who gets it, and how? How much does a graduate student cost? Even normally, science funding is a rich topic w…

I put together a rough presentation on how US science funding works, for my & neighboring research groups, mainly aimed at grad students. Lots of neat graphs! (Each could be a story of its own...) Quiz questions! I pasted it into a blog post: eighteenthelephant.com/2025/06/11/a...

Envious that colleagues at the TSRC workshop “Self-assembly in non-equilibrium systems” are hiking Bridal Veil Falls—but with my talk this afternoon, I stayed back to edit slides, + make a Broader Impacts highlight for NSF. I did hike Sunday, so just missing the “talking science while hiking” part!

End-of-semester Das Lab dinner tonight. I asked what we should toast to, and one of my mentees said, ‘To science.’ Couldn’t have picked a better one."

Had a great time speaking at @RITOsher about our work on cartilage shear mechanics and better models for insight into osteoarthritis. Packed room, lots of thoughtful questions, great conversations— thank you organizers and the NSF. Couldn't have done it #WithoutNSF.

www.rit.edu/osher/events...

Some very happy lab news from this past week— Sam has accepted an offer to join the Physics PhD program at Princeton this fall, and Luke will be heading to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for a summer REU in Physics. I’m super proud of and excited for them both! 🎉🎆

Physics and AST spring semester picnic -- collective excitations at low T :)

Rigidity transitions in anisotropic networks: a crossover scaling analysis We study how the rigidity transition in a triangular lattice changes as a function of anisotropy by preferentially filling bonds on the lattice in one direction. We discover that the onset of rigidity...

Super happy for this new paper from a collaboration with Itai Cohen, Jim Sethna, and Bulbul Chakraborty that just came out in Soft Matter. The first author, William Wang, was an undergrad at Cornell (now CS PhD student at Stanford) when he did the work and an absolute joy to discuss and work with.

SKAP binding to microtubules reduces friction at the kinetochore-microtubule interface and increases attachment stability under force The kinetochore links chromosomes to spindle microtubules to drive chromosome segregation at cell division. We recently uncovered that the kinetochore…

So happy and excited to see this work out! …. and to be a part of this cool story. This was a wonderful collaboration with Sophie Dumont, and her mentees Miquel Rosas-Salvans and Caleb Rux, which started when Miquel came to a seminar I gave at UCSF last year.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Das Lab action shots from days 4 and 5 at the #APSSummit25.
I (invited) and Keegan spoke in the Biological Active Matter IV session, Jonathan in the Non-Equilibrium Self Assembly and Self Organization II session, and Sam in the Macromolecular Assembly in Cells III: Agency session.

Das Lab at the #APSSummit25

Das Lab action shots from days 1 and 2 at the #APSSummit25. Aravind giving his talk yesterday; Alberto and Soumik giving their talks today; me, Alberto, and Keegan grabbing a quick lunch at the food trucks between sessions (my lunch consisted of churros and boba tea 🙂)

I am also chairing a Focus Session tomorrow (Monday) -- Mechanics of Cells and Tissues I -- starting at 8 am at the Anaheim Hilton, Pacific B (Ballroom Level).

Those of you @ the #APSSummit25 in Anaheim this week, please come check out talks by my mentees and me below. They are all at the Hilton.

Was finally able to log into #SciENcv

Please join us Fri Feb 28 for exciting talks by Clarice Aiello @claricedaiello.bsky.social (Weak magnetic field effects in biology are measurable—accelerated Xenopus embryogenesis in the absence of the geomagnetic field) & Boris Veytsman (Motion of Influenza A virus: The role of irreversibility).

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With Hao Shi ('13), one of our standout undergraduates (and an informal mentee of mine), who was visiting RIT yesterday to receive an RIT Emerging Leader award! Photos include our provost in an unexpected photobomb and some of my current mentees who joined to celebrate Hao's felicitation :)

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For a few hours, I set aside all worries to celebrate the achievements of my incredible mentees!
With Sam Silliman who has been accepted into several of his top-choice Physics PhD programs (Princeton, UCLA, UT Austin, and Georgia tech), and one of Sam's other mentors.

Please join BPPB Fri Feb 21, for talks by Jingyu Zhang (Long-range genomic loci stochastically assemble into combinatorial forms of chromosome skeleton) & Amaresh Sahu (Geometry and dynamics of drawing tethers from flat lipid membranes). For more info see sites.google.com/view/bppb-se... #biophysics

On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition Read online, download a free PDF, or order a copy in print or as an eBook.

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For Capstone Prep, right now I am hosting my colleagues for 5 minute research talks. Plus the class is reading and presenting, in small teams, chapters from this National Academies report about what it means to be a scientist and a researcher
nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/1219...

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This semester, in addition to grad Statistical Mechanics, I am also teaching undergrad Capstone Preparation (which is a new prep for me). For grad Stat Mech, I am once I am using Jim Sethna's Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity which is a great book
sethna.lassp.cornell.edu/StatMech/

Please join BPPB on Friday January 31 for exciting talks by Tapomoy Bhattacharjee (Physical confinement selectively favours bacterial growth based on cell shape) and Raffaella De Vita (The Vagina Dialogues: Breaking Taboos with Biomechanics). #biophysics

BPPB Seminar

We have a rotating group of volunteer organizers from the research community. Many of the talks from this series are available on our YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/@bppbseminar...

Excited to welcome two new undergraduate members, Tristan Khiar and Aeden Amatulli, to the Das Lab this semester! Here's a throwback to our Lab dinner last semester—looking forward to many more moments like this!

Programming scheduled self-assembly of circadian materials - Nature Communications Harnessing biomolecular systems to endow synthetic materials with life-like properties is a significant challenge. Here, the authors use the biomolecular KaiABC circadian clock proteins to control aut...

Happy to be on BlueSky!
For my first post, I am excited to share a new collaborative paper combining experiments and simulations, where we used circadian clock proteins to engineer biomaterials with time-programmed self-assembly and disassembly www.nature.com/articles/s41...