Professor Yann Chemla received his PhD. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. As an experimentalist in applied superconductivity, he developed an interest in biology through his study of magnetotactic bacteria with a superconducting magnetometer (Chemla et al., Biophys J., 1999), and the development of a biosensor based on functionalized magnetic nanoparticles (Chemla et al., PNAS, 2000).

Prof. Chemla made the “leap” to biophysics as a postdoctoral fellow, moving down the hall to Prof. Carlos Bustamante’s laboratory at Berkeley. There, he learned the techniques of single-molecule manipulation and used an optical trap to study viral DNA packaging (Chemla et al., Cell, 2005). In 2005, he received one of the prestigious Career Awards at the Scientific Interface (CASI) from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. He joined the Department of Physics at Illinois in January 2007.