Udayan Mohanty (Chemistry)

Promoted to full professor

Ph.D., Brown University

Faculty member since 1984

Specialization: Theories of molecular motion, in physical chemistry and biophysical chemistry

Representative publication: “Dynamics of Bent DNA Molecules in Polyacrylamide Gels” (Electrophoresis, 2002)

“A pressing problem which has essentially gone unsolved for 30 years or so is how molecules move around in a liquid. Scientists have found you can cool a liquid any way you want—it can be a simple liquid like oxygen or a very complicated organic molecule—it turns out molecular motion is almost the same as a function of temperature. The bulk of what I do is come up with strategies to explain that. The applications go from trying to understand how fish survive in the Arctic Ocean to designing containers for the disposal of nuclear waste. I’m working right now on understanding molecular motion one molecule at a time. Another thrust of my work is to understand how DNA and RNA migrate. The beauty of biological problems is they’re infinitely richer: These are huge molecules. And yet the more complicated a problem becomes, it turns out there is some simplicity which arises.”