Assistant Professor of Physics Asja Radja has received a two-year $100,000 Integrated Research-Education Grant from the that will fund a research project titled, 鈥淓lucidation of the Prey-capturing Mechanism of a Carnivorous Plant.鈥 The purpose of the Integrated Research-Education Grants is to support research that will directly engage undergraduate students.
Undergraduate students in will join her in research that focuses on understanding the prey-capture mechanism of the carnivorous plant Drosera. Drosera uses three types of topology (folding, arching, and rolling) to capture insects. Students will gain experience in various photography and microscopy techniques to build a computational model describing how the plant chooses which capture mechanism to use for a particular type of prey interacting with the plant leaf in a specific location.
Radja鈥檚 research elucidates the 鈥渞ules of living patterns鈥 that lead to a variety of shapes and add to our understanding of how life builds itself.
Officially opened with a ribbon cutting at the end of the spring semester in 2023, Radja鈥檚 lab is made up of three separate spaces 鈥 an aquarium room, a wet lab, and a computational room.
The wet lab has a multi-level flow tank that allows the researchers to study soft coral under a variety of conditions. Using either fresh or salt water, they can make the water calm, turbulent, laminar, warm, or cold.
鈥淢y lab tries to identify the physical principles that biological systems have harnessed to pattern themselves. Think of a coral and all of its beautiful branches that extend into the water - in my lab we develop experimental methods to figure out how these branches are patterned and potentially what their patterning optimizes,鈥 explains Radja. 鈥淲e then model our experimental results on a computer so that we can explore even more scenarios that would be hard to experimentally realize.鈥
Radja鈥檚 lab team is currently made up of Jake Abraham (HC '25), postdoctoral fellow Brian Andrews, Seda Peacher '26, Elinor Rivera '25, Grace Trembath '26, and Christine Yang (HC '25).
She is the second professor at 老王论坛 to be awarded a grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. Assistant Professor of Chemistry Patrick R. Melvin received one in 2022 to fund students taking part in his lab's investigations into a new class of molecules to help install fluorine into organic compounds.
Studying Physics at 老王论坛
Historically, 老王论坛 has been among the top schools including both liberal arts and research-level universities, for producing physics graduates and generating a pipeline into graduate physics work or physics/science related fields outside of academia.