Ben is a fourth year in the biophysics graduate group and mentored by David Limmer. On the whole, Ben’s research has focused on developing a practical framework to help understand how noisy complex physical systems leverage nonequilibrium forces to regulate their speed of function.

Ben uses theory and computation to investigate how nanoscale proteins channel forces like the ones exerted on them during biosynthesis and a host of cellular maintenance processes to speedup large-scale structural rearrangement. Ben is collaborating with the Bustamante lab, where direct measurement of nonequilibrium forces and the nanoscopic conformation changes they induce has become possible with single-molecule optical tweezing experiments. Ben and the Bustamante group are studying a model protein to codify how folding and force are distributed between its modular subunits. To characterize emergent intermediate states on the pathway to folding, Ben is using amino-acid level simulations to monitor how energy dissipation travels along the protein backbone under various experimental forcing protocols.

Ben is applying newly discovered nonequilibrium speed limits to probe how dissipative coupling modulates transition rates, and variational principles that will lend a new perspective on the iterative design of optical tweezing protocols to achieve specific goals in fixed-time. He is working towards engineering these optimal protocols to manipulate proteins with minimal experimental artifacts and to guide them faithfully towards their native folded structure.