Brief Vita

• Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2025-present)
• Miller Postdoctoral Fellow, Physics, Johns Hopkins University (2024)
• Postdoctoral Scholar, The University of Chicago (2019-2024)
• PhD, Chemistry, University of Utah (2018)
• BS, Chemistry, Zhejiang University (2012)

Selected Honors

• Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship, Physics, Johns Hopkins University (2024)
• Yen Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, University of Chicago (2019)
• Cheves T. Walling Award for Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Chemistry, University of Utah (2019)

Research Interests

I am a biophysicist exploring the fascinating world of non-equilibrium emergent behaviors in soft matter and biophysical systems. My research group employs a combination of computer simulations, machine learning techniques, and theoretical approaches to uncover fundamental principles governing the self-assembly process in living systems. Through our work, my group aims to gain deeper insights into the dynamic behaviors of living materials.

Selected Publications

Elucidating the Role of Filament Turnover in Cortical Flow using Simulations and Representation Learning

Y Qiu, ED White, EM Munro, S Vaikuntanathan, AR Dinner

arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.10819

A strong nonequilibrium bound for sorting of cross-linkers on growing biopolymers

Y Qiu, M Nguyen, GM Hocky, AR Dinner, S Vaikuntanathan

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (38)

Thermodynamic control of activity patterns in cytoskeletal networks

A Lamtyugina*, Y Qiu*, É Fodor, AR Dinner, S Vaikuntanathan (* denotes equal contribution)

Physical Review Letters 129 (12), 128002

Ice nucleation efficiency of hydroxylated organic surfaces is controlled by their structural fluctuations and mismatch to ice

Y Qiu, N Odendahl, A Hudait, R Mason, AK Bertram, F Paesani, …

Journal of the American Chemical Society 139 (8), 3052-3064

How size and aggregation of ice-binding proteins control their ice nucleation efficiency

Y Qiu, A Hudait, V Molinero

Journal of the American Chemical Society 141 (18), 7439-7452

Please see Google Scholar for the full publication list.