Biography
Maria Mukhina received a PhD degree in Optics (2013) from ITMO University (Saint Petersburg, Russia) where she investigated the physics of anisotropic and chiral nanocrystals. This work was supported by the Scholarship of the President of the Russian Federation for Young Scientists and Graduate Students. In 2016, Dr. Mukhina started her postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University where she worked on intracellular force sensing as applied to the mechanics of chromosomes. Dr. Mukhina joined UMD Physics as an assistant professor in 2024. Her research relies on nanobiotechnology, materials science, and new microscopy techniques to elucidate the mechanics of the genome.
Research
Dr. Mukhina’s lab is interested in how cells use mechanical energy to operate and regulate subcellular structures consisting of millions of molecules. These structures generate, transduce, and respond to mechanical forces and strains that originate at the individual molecules and scale up to microns. To access this information, the lab develops intracellular force nanoprobes with quantitative optical readout, in vivo force-generating apparatus, in situ mechano-molecular controls, and novel adaptations of super-resolution imaging to be used in a synergistic combination. They apply these tools to elucidate the biochemistry-agnostic mechanisms of a number of pathways where piconewton forces are thought to be important. The special focus is on the pathways that cells use to distribute regulatory information and orchestrate global transitions between different functional architectures of the genome, both physiological and pathological.Research Area: Biophysics