Contact Information
Research Description
Understanding how the remarkable functionality of biological nanomachines comes about from the spatial arrangement of their atoms and using this knowledge to design synthetic systems that exceed in the performance of their biological counterparts is the focus of this group's research program.
Imagine assembling a few thousand marbles into a machine capable of transforming the energy of an electric field into mechanical torque at nearly 100% efficiency and lasting ten million cycles. Although marbles are not atoms, Nature has done exactly that, assembling carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen atoms into remarkable nanomachines. And while Nature took billions of years to transform primordial dirt into the molecular motors that power living cells, the atoms comprising present-day biomachines are no different from those found in common inorganic compounds, and they obey the same laws of physics that enable the machines's amazing properties. Understanding how the remarkable functionality of biological nanomachines comes about from the spatial arrangement of their atoms and using this knowledge to design synthetic systems that exceed in the performance of their biological counterparts is the focus of this group's research program.
Education
M.S., 1996, Ivan Franko Lviv State University, Ukraine (Particle Physics)
Ph.D., 1999, Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland (Chemistry)
Postdoc., 1999-2001, Material Science Lab R&D Center, Mitsui Chemicals, Tokyo, Japan
Postdoc., 2001-2005, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group
Awards and Honors
NSF CAREER Award
Beckman Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies
IBM Faculty Fellow Award
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Physics
John Bardeen Faculty Scholar, Physics
Professor, Bioengineering
Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Affiliate, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Recent Publications
Ahmad, M., Wang, Y., Krishnan, S., Imran, A., Aksimentiev, A., & Movileanu, L. (2026). A Site-Specific Self-Association of a Protein Hub Drives Its Phase Separation. ACS chemical biology, 21(1), 46-61. https://doi.org/10.1021/acschembio.5c00424
Aksimentiev, A., Keyser, U. F., & Wilkinson, M. (2025). Nucleic acid and other compositions and methods for the modulation of cell membranes. (U.S. Patent No. 12195753).
Pandey, L., Panigaj, M., Radwan, Y., Chhabra, H., Chen, Y., Aksimentiev, A., Afonin, K. A., & Wanunu, M. (2025). Chemical Composition and Backbone Modifications Define Deformability of Nucleic Acid Nanoparticles. ACS Nano, 19(27), 24972-24984. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.5c04293
Shin, D. H., Kim, S. H., Coshic, K., Watanabe, K., Taniguchi, T., Verbiest, G. J., Caneva, S., Aksimentiev, A., Steeneken, P. G., & Joo, C. (2025). Diffusion of DNA on Atomically Flat 2D Material Surfaces. ACS Nano, 19(23), 21307-21318. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.4c16277
Soni, N., Rosenstock, Z., Verma, N. C., Siddharth, K., Talor, N., Liu, J., Marom, B., Kolomeisky, A. B., Aksimentiev, A., & Meller, A. (2025). Full-length protein classification via cysteine fingerprinting in solid-state nanopores. Nature Nanotechnology, 20(10), 1482-1490. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-025-02016-w