Michael Francis Hagan

Michael Hagan is Professor of Physics and of Quantitative Biology at Brandeis. He received a BSE and PhD in Chemical Engineering respectively from the University of Connecticut and University of California at Berkeley, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with David Chandler in Theoretical Chemistry at the Univeresity of California at Berkeley. Michael’s lab uses computational modeling and theory to understand the physical principles that control assembly and dynamical organization in biological, biomimetic, and other soft condensed matter systems. Because assembling structures can be orders of magnitude larger than the individual components that comprise them, the lab develops and apply computational and theoretical methods that bridge disparate length and time scales. Applications include understanding the assembly of viral capsids and other large protein complexes, discovering the mechanisms by which proteins interconvert between different conformations, and understanding emergent behaviors in active matter systems (materials whose constituent elements consume energy to generate motion, such as the internal components of a cell).