Professor Lorna Dougan

Talk title: Designer protein biomaterials: from molecular mechanics to functional networks

Biological systems rely on hierarchical architecture to achieve the superior mechanical performance and environmental responsiveness essential for life. These assemblies are built from proteins that perform their roles by undergoing precise structural and mechanical rearrangements. However, a major challenge is to understand how the mechanical properties of an individual protein translates to the collective response of a protein network. Without this understanding, we remain limited in our capacity to decode the complexities of living systems and fully exploit the potential of proteins as building blocks in engineered biomaterials. Solving this problem requires an integrated interdisciplinary approach. In this talk I will share our recent progress in understanding how folded protein networks behave across scales, and show how this knowledge allows us to mimic Nature’s complexity and engineer novel living matrices for applications in healthcare and sustainability.

About this speaker

Lorna Dougan is full Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds and Chair of the British Biophysical Society. She obtained a MPhys and PhD in Physics at the University of Edinburgh and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University in New York, USA. In 2009 she established her group at Leeds, where she is a member of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology  and the Bragg Centre for Materials Research. Her group focuses on understanding the physics of life and developing novel materials inspired by biomolecules. She combines experimental and modelling approaches to achieve a cross length scale understanding of structure and mechanics, and in particular the translation of mechanical properties across scales. This includes protein engineering, single molecule force spectroscopy, rheology and neutron and x-ray scattering. Her group works in collaboration with biological, biomedical scientists and engineers to understand the physics of living systems and to develop materials for biomedical and sustainability applications. She currently leads an ERC Consolidator Grant/UKRI Frontier Research Fellowship to exploit protein unfolding to control mesoscale network formation.