USC graduate student wins international paper competition

Alison Kraigsley, a graduate student in USC’s Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, recently won first place (out of 88 submissions) in the poster competition at the “Dynamics Days Europe 2003” conference in Palma de Mallorca, Spain on September 27th, 2003 for her poster entitled, “Dynamics of Self-Propagating Fronts of Motile Bacteria”, co-authored by Prof. Paul Ronney from the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering department and Prof. Steven Finkel from the Molecular and Computational Biology Program. This conference was attended by prominent scientists in many fields from both European and American academic institutions. The poster described experimental research showing how colonies of spreading bacteria behave as “reaction-diffusion fronts” analogous to flames, polymers, and some acid-base reactions. This knowledge may lead to an improved understanding of the spread of infectious bacteria in medical devises such as catheters, implants and contact lenses, the fouling of oil and water pipelines by bacteria, and augmented oil production using film-forming bacteria.

This research was supported by the USC Zumberge Interdisciplinary Research Fund.

Spreading colony of Escherichia coli bacteria in a standard Petri dish.

Further information:

Prof. Ronney’s website: http://carambola.usc.edu/research/biophysics/BacterialFronts.html

Prof. Finkel’s website: http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/biosci/faculty/finkel.html

Conference awards: http://www.imedea.uib.es/~ddays/awards.htm

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