There are some new names joining University science departments this fall, and though Raghuveer Parthasarathy’s may be particularly hard to pronounce, it hasn’t fazed those who work
with him.
Since his arrival at the University in June, many students and faculty have taken to simply calling him “Raghu.”
Parthasarathy was hired as a physics assistant professor, but he focused on lab research of biological membranes and light optics this summer. He said he’s been so busy that he only recently had his office phone number set up – nearly two monthsafter his arrival.
In lab, Parthasarathy said, he essentially creates artificial cell membranes and studies their mechanical and biological properties, including how they move and what their physical characteristics are once formed. He said the process of building them is simpler than one might think.
“The first step of it is to just put all the molecules together and they themselves will form a membrane, which is actually one of the more remarkable things about these structures. They self-assemble,” Parthasarathy said. “The physics of it is very similar to the way a soap film
spontaneously forms.”
Despite his nonchalance, such work is not always easy. Parthasarathy and his two graduate student teaching assistants, Chris Harland and Yupeng Kong, often have to use high-tech methods to manipulate the particles that go into a membrane. Parthasarathy and Kong demonstrated one of these methods the day they took the Emerald into the lab.
Using a powerful microscope and a fluorescent laser beam, Parthasarathy used a beam of light directed through lenses to trap particles that make up a membrane. As Kong rotated the points of light, the particles under the microscope rotated
with them.
“It allows us to manipulate these and build structures out of them,” Parthasarathy said.
Once the membranes are created, Parthasarathy said, they are used to coat microscopic-sized glass particles, which are then used to make crystals and other structures with different optical properties. The artificial membranes allow these interactions to happen, he said.
“In general, for making things out of these particles, it’s very difficult to control these particle-particle interactions. And that’s what you need to do for a lot of basic science and technological things,” Parthasarathy said. “So, the idea is to use these membrane-membrane interactions to control the particle-particle interactions.”
Parthasarathy’s group is using a relatively new method of making these optical
materials, he said, by combining biological elements with physics tools.
“So far nobody else has come up with any other way to build these sorts of crystals, so we think the biology may offer the key to that puzzle,” Parthasarathy said.
Kong said he is grateful for the opportunity to get hands-on experience with Parthasarathy in an authentic lab setting.
“I think this work is very interesting,” Kong said.
In another part of the lab, Harland prepared the lipid particles for the same procedure. To do this, he forced them through an ultra-fine filter with a pump that reaches pressures up to 100 pounds per square inch. The holes in the filter, he said, are smaller than the width of a human hair. After the process is complete, the lipid byproducts are small enough to be used in a sample.
“It’s a long process, but it works,” Harland said.
Harland was also happy to be able to work the full-time lab job. “There’s lots of stuff to do, and our lab is very hands-on,” he said. “Our projects are very visual projects.”
Parthasarathy completed his undergraduate work in physics at the University of California, Berkeley and earned his doctorate of physics in 2002 at the University of Chicago.
Parthasarathy returned to UC Berkeley to conduct post-doctoral research in chemistry before coming to the University this fall for his first faculty teaching position.
Parthasarathy will teach his first class this fall: a 300-level physics class. He said he is comfortable lecturing, but the long-term planning of a class worries him.
“There’s a big difference between planning one, one-hour talk or something like that and planning ten weeks’ worth of talks,”
he said.
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