Biophysics would like to introduce our newest faculty member, Professor Aaron Frank. Aaron comes to us from postdoctoral studies as a prestigious Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he worked on developing a framework for modeling the structure of small non-coding RNA molecules. Aaron carried out undergraduate studies at City University of New York, majoring in Chemistry. He completed his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from UC, Irvine and worked as a research fellow for two years, prior to moving to Michigan as a postdoctoral scholar, at Nymirum – a small pharmaceutical company directed toward drug development for RNA targets.

Professor Frank’s research program in Biophysics will focus on the development of integrative approaches to elucidate the ensembles of conformations of small non-coding RNA molecules that are of growing importance as potential targets for cellular control and function. His research will employ both experimental techniques of nucleic acids (e.g., NMR, mass-spec, crosslinking, and circular dichroism) and computational biophysics, thus combining key approaches for characterizing the structure and motions of flexible molecules. We all welcome Aaron to the faculty.