01.10.20 – EPFL Professors Suliana Manley (School of Basic Sciences) and Sylvie Roke (School of Engineering) have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.

The American Physical Society (APS) is the world’s largest organization of physicists. It was founded in 1899 with the aim to “to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics”. Today, the APS numbers some 50,000 members worldwide, and publishes over a dozen scientific journals, including the prestigious Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. It also runs more than twenty science conferences each year, and is a member society of the American Institute of Physics.

Despite its size, APS Fellows make up a mere 0.5% of the Society’s membership, making it a distinct honor. According to its criteria, fellowships is awarded for “exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise; e.g., outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education.”

This year, the APS has elected into its Fellows Professors Suliana Manley and Sylvie Roke at EPFL’s Institute of Physics and Institute of Bioengineering respectively. Professor Manley’s research focuses on the dynamic assembly of proteins and developing a physical paradigm for how proteins form mesoscale assemblies. Her lab develops and uses automated super-resolution fluorescence imaging techniques combined with live cell imaging and single molecule tracking to determine how the dynamics of protein assembly are coordinated.

Professor Roke’s research focuses on understanding the molecular-level details of water-related biological processes. Her lab investigates such process on various length scales and with varying degrees of complexity using a number of cutting-edge techniques including second harmonic scattering, sum frequency scattering, wide-field multiphoton microscopy, and modelling.