Macosko Lab

Current People

Jed Macosko, Professor of Physics

Prof. Jed Macosko holds a B.S. from MIT and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral researcher under Prof. Carlos Bustamante, and also under Prof. David Keller. The Macosko-Holzwarth lab is currently focused on the mechanical properties of cancer. Prof. Macosko first collaborated with Dr. George Holzwarth in 2004 to explore how multiple motor proteins pull a single cargo in living cells. Prof. Macosko also partners with the lab of Profs. Keith Bonin and Martin Guthold to develop a new drug discovery platform and with Dr. A. Daniel Johnson of the Department of Biology to develop new teaching technologies.

Lab Alumni

George Holzwarth, 1937-2024 (in lab 1983-2024)

George Holzwarth was most recently a Research Professor in the Wake Forest Physics Department. He always pointed out that our lab is concerned with 3 problems: 1) the load-dependence of molecular motors, especially kinesin-1, and how multiple motors cooperate or interfere with one another; 2) how cells move along two-dimensional surfaces; 3) how cells penetrate gels, layers of cells, and the extracellular matrix.. Using video microscopy of gfp-labelled peroxisomes, we record the thermally driven motions of vesicles in live cells. From the vesicle tracks, we extract intracellular mechanical properties such as the elastic and viscous shear moduli of the cytoplasm. These moduli are likely to play a role in the dynamics of cell deformation. A long-standing difficulty afflicting the analysis of particle tracks is their start-stop nature. We’ve been developing a hidden Markov, variational Bayes, Gaussian mixture model to objectively separate tracks into 2 or more states characterized by whether the vesicle is motor-driven or obeys the laws of diffusion.

Amanda Hinds (neé Smelser), Ph.D.

Amanda earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2016. She was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She continues to be interested in the mechanical properties of breast cancer cells and the influence of microenvironment stiffness gradients on their invasive potential. To determine the viscoelastic properties of normal and cancerous mammary epithelial cells, she tracked peroxisome motion in motor-inhibited and ATP-depleted cells. She is now developing 3D photoactivatable collagen environments with stiffness gradients for determining if normal and cancerous breast cells experience durotactic migration and localize to regions of specific stiffness. Amanda has also been a fiddler in a bluegrass band from Walkertown, NC called The Grassifieds.

Scott Smyre, Ph.D.

Scott hailed from Salisbury, North Carolina. He achieved his ultimate goal of becoming a biomedical engineer. He was the trumpet visual section leader and library coordinator for The Spirit of the Old Gold and Black. He was a brother of Kappa Kappa Psi Spring '13. He helped with the process of re-chartering MAPS (Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students) on our campus. In the lab, he worked with the goal of gelling collagen by UV radiation.

Adam O'Dell

Scott was a Biophysics major with a Mathematics minor and hailed from Greensboro, North Carolina. Outside of the lab, he was the captain for my intramural soccer team. He was also heavily involved in the campus ministry group, Presby. In the lab, he worked on a few different projects, e.g., using tracking software to compute the viscoelastic modulus for cells that were inhibited by Blebbsitatin. He worked on creating a collagen gel with a stiffness gradient.

Victoria Gee

Victoria was Biophysics major with a minor in Mathematics, who originally hailed from Long Island, New York. She was heavily involved with two organizations on campus, Wake Radio and Gay-Straight Student Alliance, as well as a national member of Phi Mu Fraternity. In the lab, she worked on improving our method of particle tracking to analyze the viscoelastic modulus for collagen gels.

Manuel Gomez

Manuel was a Biology major with a Chemistry minor who hailed from Matthews, North Carolina. In the lab, he worked on making collagen gels with a stiffness gradient and measuring them with an Atomic Force Microscope to get the Young's Modulus.

Other Previous Members

Lawson McDonald '15

Tim Kreutzfeldt '14

Hillary McDonald '12

Matthew Martin '12