Dr. Lea Ferreira dos Santos, assistant professor of physics at Stern College for Women, was elected to the Executive Committee of the Forum on Physics and Society of the American Physical Society.

Dr. Emil Prodan, also assistant professor of physics at Stern, recently had a paper selected for publication in Physical Review Letters. Prodan and his collaborator and co-author, Camelia Prodan, discovered the mechanical analog of graphene, a lattice of rigid dimers with vibrational properties never seen before. The lattice was inspired from the structure of Microtubules, a biomaterial synthesized by almost all living organisms. Based on the peculiar properties of the mechanical model, Prodan and his collaborator put forward a new mechanism for the so called “Dynamical Instability” of Microtubules, a process that is paramount for cell division and intracellular transport. The work will appear under the title: “Topological phonon modes and their role in dynamic instability of microtubules."