Biophysical Society Bulletin | January 2018

Biophysicist in Profile

Padmini Rangamani Area of Research Integrating biochemical signal transduction with mechanical forces in cellular processes.

Institution University of California, San Diego

At-a-Glance

Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Padmini Rangamani enjoyed writing poetry and embroidering and thought she might study literature or needlecraft. In high school her interests led her toward sci- ence and math. “Now, as it was then, I can easily get interested in a variety of things,” she shares. “[Throughout my career,] I’ve gone wherever I’ve gotten the most curious.” Going forward, Rangamani hopes to develop models that combine mechanics and signaling to explain complex biological processes. She says, “I want to keep pushing the boundaries of spatial modeling in cellular processes and comparisons between models and experiments.”

Padmini Rangamani

Padmini Rangamani , assistant professor in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), grew up in Hyderabad, India. As a child she enjoyed writing poetry and embroidering and thought she might study literature or needlecraft. Then she decided that she wanted to work helping homeless and aging populations. “Now, as it was then, I can easily get interest- ed in a variety of things,” she shares. “You’ll see that in my training choices — I’ve gone wherever I’ve gotten the most curious.” In high school her interests led her toward science and math, with the influence of a good teacher. “In India, you often choose to pursue engineering or medicine at the end of high school. I remember having a major dilemma: do I give up math to study medicine or do I give up biology to study

engineering?” she says. “I remember telling my mom that I dreamt that math told me not to betray it and that’s how I went into engineering.” Rangamani attended the College of Technology, Osmania University, in Hyderabad and obtained her bachelor’s degree in 2001 in chemical engineering. She then went to Georgia Institute of Technology and obtained a master’s degree in chemical engineering before beginning her PhD studies in systems biology in the lab of Ravi Iyengar at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “When I was training as a chemical engineer, reaction engi- neering and transport phenomena were my favorite subjects. Then, I saw that signal transduction can be thought of as reaction engineering in different geometries and this was the focus of my PhD,” she explains. “This area [of research] is probably best described as `Systems Biophysics’ and I got into this thanks to my PhD and postdoctoral advisors and men- tors.” Towards the end of her PhD, Rangamani became very in- terested in membrane curvature. “I decided that I needed to understand how thin materials bend and curve. My postdoc with Professor George Oster at the University of California, Berkeley, was focused on lipid bilayer mechanics. Working with George was eye-opening for me in the way he thought about physics and biology,” she says. “I also worked very closely with David Steigmann at Berkeley at this time. He has been instrumental in mentoring me in differential geometry and mathematics.” In 2014, after her postdoc, Rangamani began her position at UCSD. “Current projects in the lab are focused on integrating spatial models of signaling with mechanics, with an empha- sis on dendritic spines. We are also working on developing

Members of Rangamani’s lab (Chabanon and Ritvik Vasan) teaching middle school students and Rangamani’s children about surface tension, using soap films.

January 2018

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