Ai-Hua Xie (谢爱华), Oklahoma State University
November 4, Thursday, 9:00-10:30
Zoom会议号: 930 130 2021 密码: 202111
Abstract
Sensing is vital for survival of living systems. Humans have five senses: vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, while some animals have an additional sense, magnetic sensing. From evolution point of view, biological sensing is ancient, bacteria have developed sensing of light, toxins, and magnetic fields. We study how the signals of light, magnetic fields, or temperature are detected at the molecular levels in bacteria (photoreception), birds (magnetoreception), and human (thermoreception). In my talk, I will share with you our experimental and computational studies on mechanisms of biological sensing, as well as challenges, controversies, accidental discoveries, and open questions during our exploration.
About the speaker
Dr. Aihua XIE is a Professor of Physics and the Founding Director of Center for Advanced Infrared Biology at Oklahoma State University in the United States. She did her undergraduate study in physics at Zhejiang University (1978-1981), and completed her PhD in physics and biophysics in 1987 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the United States. Dr. Xie (a member of CUSPEA 1980) is grateful to Professor TD Lee, ZJU physics faculty, and many of those worked to make CUSPEA possible and available for the opportunity of advanced education in physics and biophysics.
Dr. Xie’s research interests encompass biological sensing, protein dynamics, proton transfer, intrinsically disordered proteins, and quantum biology. She is a pioneer in the emerging field of time-resolved infrared structural biology. Dr. Xie is a Fellow of American Physical Society. She was elected to Chair of the Division of Biological Physics of American Physical Society (2011), and Chair of the Commission of Biological Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) (2014-2017).