Thomas' paper is out in PNAS! We celebrated with some flatbread pizza🍕and candlepin🎳bowling

The group finally agreed to accompany Thomas to Candlepin bowling (after two years of him requesting this for a group activity) after he enlightened us with his finding that using Cryo-EM measurements of subunit-pair fluctuations can help us infer mechanical properties that can be predictive of distributions of larger assemblies. Needless to say, Thomas was right as usual, candlepin bowling was fun, and the flatbread pizza was even better, except for just the potato pizza (carbs on carbs is not fun)

A very Thresher fall in the Rogers Lab

The horror movie night theme this year was voted Thresher. We are talking Children of the Corn, The Wicker Man, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On the chiller side we also went apple picking at the Honeypot Hill Orchard with other MRSEC members. Added some spooky slides on our presentations for the Complex Fluids workshop.

Winner of this year's Annual Hot Sauce competition at the Rogers Lab declared!

While Sasha from the Duclos lab walked away with the winning crown for her non-chalant munching of crackers glazed in the D’Bomb and Mr. Pain, Hunter put up a valorous fight till the very end. Madhurima ran away in tears from burning mouth in the pen-ultimate level of the game. All in all, a very entertaining (painful for some) afternoon in the Rogers lab.
Honorable mentions to Myeonggon and Rupam for volunteering to taste the hottest sauce in solidarity with the competitors, and displaying an entertaining show of their suffering.

Ben is now the Chair of the Engineering Science program at Brandeis and Mason receives an award!

Congratulations to Ben Rogers on being appointed the Soffer Endowed Chair in Engineering Science and taking over the role of chair of the interdepartmental program in Engineering Science. We are very excited to see the already unique engineering curriculum grow even more with your leadership.
And congratulations, Mason Price, on being awarded the "Molly W. and Charles K. Schiff Award in Science" for the creativity and originality you demonstrate in all your work.

Fun at the Holiday party

The Rogers Lab ended the year with a vibrant holiday party and sumptuous dinner while making some art work. Here is a picture of Hunter and Mason’s effort at assembling a pretzel house. Don’t judge their self-assembly expertise based on these images

The group presents at the 100th NECF workshop organised at Brandeis

The Brandeis MRSEC hosted the 100th New England Complex Fluids workshop on 20th September 2024. It was a wonderful event with nearly 40 soundbites from researchers from all major schools in New England and invited talks ranging from designing biomaterials to making open science tools to quantify their mechanical behavior. Grads, undergrads and postdocs from the lab presented their works on DNA origami, colloidal crystals and enzyme diffusion at the workshop. Here are a few glimpses of them presenting their work.