Assistant Professor Petia Vlahovska Wins Salomon Award

Assistant Professor of Engineering Petia Vlahovska was one of 15 faculty researchers who were honored on March 14 with a Salomon Award. The competitive grants come courtesy of the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).

Clyde Briant, vice president for research, said the awards are primarily to stimulate new research projects by faculty. “We know oftentimes it’s hard to get (federal) funding” to begin major research projects, Briant said. “These funds are in place to help you do that.”

“We are the entity in modern society that’s charged with discovery,” said Provost Mark Schlissel, congratulating the award recipients. “This is what we thrive on, this is what we’re here for.” Schlissel, like Briant, noted that these awards are important for jump-starting complex research projects by getting preliminary data. “These awards help get research projects off the ground and get them competitive for further funding,” Schlissel said.

The Salomon Awards were established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit. Recipients receive as much as $15,000. The Salomon Awards have been administered by OVPR since 2003, and a total of about $2 million has been awarded to 132 faculty.

Vlahovska won a $15,000 award for her proposal, “Tension regulated phase separation in biomimetic multicomponent membranes.” Cells and cellular organelles are encapsulated by membranes composed of hundreds of lipids. This lipid diversity is essential for cell functions such as signaling: lipid mixtures organize into rafts, which serve as platforms for molecular-binding events at the membrane interface. Raft dynamics is regulated by physio-chemical variables like composition, temperature, and tension.

Vlahovska’s proposed research centers on the effects of tension on raft evolution and stability, which is virtually unexplored due to difficulties in tension control and quantification. Vlahovska proposes the use of electric fields and microfluidic flows to create well-defined tension conditions that will allow her to experimentally investigate lipid demixing and domain evolution in tense membranes. This knowledge will benefit bioengineering applications that exploit cell signaling machinery, such as targeted drug delivery.

New Faculty Profile: Petia Vlahovska

Petia Vlahovska is likely one of the few scientists who can say that she earned a nickname simply by trying to explain what she does. While at Dartmouth, she had distilled her explanation of studying complex fluids to saying she researched chocolate.

“Ever since, when I was on campus, some would say there is the Chocolate Lady,” she said.

While the description remains accurate, the nickname hardly does justice to the research horizons that Vlahovska, assistant professor of engineering, brought to Brown this fall.

Vlahovska is interested in complex fluids, a range of common items from paint to shampoo — and chocolate. She’s also interested in living substances such as blood or the membranes that surround cells and cellular organelles. She wants to determine how all these materials respond to flow or electrical fields.

She is keen on a project to punch nanopores in human cells using electrical pulses. The pursuit is no cheap engineering thrill: The holes, which can be as small as one-billionth of a meter across, can have major implications for medicine, such as delivering drugs directly to cancerous cells without affecting healthy ones.

“The key point is the pores have to form reversibly. You zap the cell, the pore opens, and then it has to close itself,” she said. “It’s a very well-known biological tool, initially developed for gene transfer,” Vlahovska said, “but it’s poorly understood how to control it.”

Vlahovska plans to collaborate with engineering professors Kenny Breuer, Thomas Powers and Anubhav Tripathi, as well as with Derek Stein in physics, on various problems that fuse biology, physics, chemistry and engineering.

“I’m technically an engineer but I consider myself all over the place,” Vlahovska said.

Vlahovska, 38, grew up in northern Bulgaria in a family of engineers, including her mother, father, brother and uncle. She attended college in the country’s capital, Sofia, and earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Yale University. Last year, she received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program award from the National Science Foundation.

From 2003 to 2005, Vlahovska was a visiting faculty member in engineering at Brown. Seeking a tenure-track position, she moved to Dartmouth. She is returning to Brown now with tenure eligibillity solidly intact.

“Let’s say I always wanted to come back, my [Brown] colleagues wanted me to come back, and so it’s good,” she said.

- By Richard C. Lewis