D. M. Czajkowsky

Dr. Daniel M. Czajkowsky is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Bio-ID center. He obtained his B.Sc. in Physics (Honors) from the University of Alberta, Canada and his Ph.D. degree in Biophysics from the University of Virginia, US. He then worked at the University of Virginia as a Research Associate, when he was awarded a Young International Fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010. With this fellowship, he did his research at Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics until 2012. He was appointed as a special investigator at SJTU in 2013 and professor in 2019. Dr. Czajkowsky has published over 85 journal articles in journals including those in Nature Communications, PNAS, ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, JACS, and EMBO Mol Med, the latter of which is one of the most highly cited papers (top 1%) in Clinical Medicine according to the Web of Science.

There are two main directions of the research in his group: structure/function studies of large bio-complexes, including chromatin, and the development of novel single-molecule based instrumentation. For the former, there are projects focused on (1) the mechanisms by which chromosomes fold within the nucleus and the functional consequences of that folding on transcription, replication and genomic stability; (2) the mechanisms by which bacterial pore-forming toxins self-assemble into membrane spanning complexes and exploiting these pores for novel biotechnological applications; and (3) the development of a novel polymeric Fc-fusion protein complex for clinical applications. For the latter direction, there are projects focused on the development of (1) a novel cryo-atomic force microscope for biological applications and (2) a unique multiplex magnetic tweezers device for studies of protein-protein interactions as well as mechano-phenotyping of cells as tissues for clinical applications.