Sachin Goyal
University of California-Merced, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Many structures in biology are long and thin, like threads: DNA, the molecule carrying our genetic code, and the fibers that give tissues their strength. How easily such a filament bends, twists or coils affects what it can do in a cell, including whether genes can be read.
- Fields
Engineering
Biophysics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
biological filaments
DNA mechanics
constitutive laws
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Develop an inverse approach within a rod model framework that estimates constitutive laws, the force-deformation rules, for thin biological filaments from all-atom simulation data and physical experiments.
- Analyze how the spatial configuration of atoms and the bond potentials individually shape a filament's constitutive law, separating geometric from energetic contributions.
- Test how the base-pair sequence of non-coding segments of DNA influences structural deformability in ways that govern gene expression.
- Determine whether a filament can be designed for a target constitutive behavior by altering its atomistic structure, and build virtual labs and educational tools for engineering students learning beam mechanics.
More about the research
Engineers model slender structures using constitutive laws, mathematical rules relating applied force to resulting deformation, but the usual rules assume simple, linear behavior and cannot capture the deformations that matter biologically.
Why it matters
Linking a filament's atomic structure to how it deforms could give bioengineers a way to manipulate biological filaments on purpose, including using mechanical and chemical signals in DNA, which the project notes could eventually inform gene therapy or cancer treatment approaches. The modeling framework also supplies mechanics with constitutive laws derived from atomic detail rather than assumed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yuhang Hu
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Formulate thermodynamically consistent constitutive laws from statistical models of evolving polymer networks, so that growth, degrowth, remodeling and stiffness change emerge from coupled reaction, transport and deformation.
Neda Maghsoodi
University of Southern California, CA·Materials Science
Measure how focused ultrasound produces localized heating, phase transition, deformation, and recovery in programmed liquid crystal elastomers, recording temperature fields, deformation histories, and material properties across ultrasound conditions and material architectures.
Marcelo Kuroda
Auburn University, AL·Materials Science
Engage ten undergraduates per summer in ten-week computational projects that model materials and molecules across length and time scales, from electronic-structure theory to continuum modeling.
The school
University of California-Merced: 3 labs on PI Pages, $77M a year on research, 112 research doctorates a year.
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