Notbohm secures $1.9M NIH award studying the mechanics of cell motion

Congratulations to Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Jacob Notbohm on his prestigious new R35 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Through his project, ‘Revealing forces driving collective cell migration,’ Notbohm will receive $1.9M over the next five years. This R35 grant is a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) funded through the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). The goal of MIRA is to increase the efficiency of NIGMS funding by providing investigators with greater stability and flexibility, thereby enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for important breakthroughs.

“This is an opportunity for growth and to move in a new area. It’s a 5 year award, giving time to take some risks, which is highly beneficial for doing innovative and challenging work. I’m definitely excited to work on this project,” Notbohm shared.

This grant is Notbohm’s first major award from the NIH.

“Broadly, I’m interested in modeling the relationship between forces and motion in cell collectives,” Notbohm explains. “Engineers use models to predict. In this case, if we had a model for cell motion, we’d be able to predict how perturbing forces in a cell layer could speed up wound healing or facilitate essential processes in tissue development. From that knowledge, biologists could look inside the cell and try to perturb the forces accordingly. Modeling these types of systems has been going on for decades, yet the field is still in its infancy. We’re still learning what are the essential pieces to include in the models and how those pieces manifest as mathematical equations. The contributions supported by this grant are new methods to measure forces coupled with finding out what pieces are important to include in the models.”

Top image: A collective of cells (white outlines). Arrows indicate experimentally measured cell motion. Credit: Aashrith Saraswathibhatla, former PhD student in Engineering Mechanics.