OVERLAPPING INTERESTS
A computational soft-matter physicist, Tüzel builds coursegrained models that simulate the behavior of complex
systems. Vidali is a biologist who uses biochemical and
genetic tools to study plant physiology at the molecular
level. The pair joined the WPI faculty in the summer
of 2009.
A generation earlier, it would have been rare for
a physicist and biologist to become academic research
partners — the felds were too disparate. But Tüzel and Vidali
aren't constrained by traditional academic boundaries. From
his early days as an undergraduate, Vidali enjoyed mathematics and the satisfaction of measuring and quantifying
his work. Likewise, Tüzel has always been fascinated by the
mysteries of biology, and he focused his postdoctoral work
on modeling the dynamics of components of living cells.
This overlapping interest was not lost on WPI. In fact,
building a research focus in the emerging feld of biophysics
was part of the strategy for recruiting the faculty class of
2009. Once Vidali and Tüzel had accepted their offers,
Germano Iannacchione, head of the Department of Physics,
lost little time in planting a seed.
"I wanted to obtain a grant to fund a microscope that
could image cellular processes in real time, and Germano
told me he thought Erkan might be interested in it, too,"
Vidali says. "So I emailed Erkan and found that he was
working for the summer as a teaching assistant in the
physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in
33