Chemical Engineering professor John Crocker has spent the last four years prodding human cells under a microscope to see how "squishy" they are.
The results of this research have been groundbreaking enough to earn him a place in Popular Science magazine's fourth annual "Brilliant Top 10" list in September.
Specifically, Crocker has been recognized for his work in the field of rheology -- the study of the deformation and flow of matter -- as applied to human cells.
Engineering senior Hank Yeh -- a student in one of Crocker's classes -- feels that Crocker definitely deserved this kind of recognition.
"He's a great professor -- really open and lively," Yeh said. "It doesn't surprise me that he won. He's been doing some great research."
Although Crocker dismissed his place on the list as nothing other than random luck, he was eager to discuss his research.
"Cells have things akin to muscles, legs, arms and bones ... sensory apparatus that allow them to sense their environment," he said, calling the textbook definition of a cell as "a bag of chemicals" an "incomplete story."
Despite having been trained as a physicist, Crocker said he has relished tackling a biological problem which he described as having a "lot of desirable features."
"It's exciting because it's deeply mysterious," he said. "It's a lot more fun working on a problem when you don't even know the basic parameters when you sit down to start."
In fact, it was Crocker's atypical background that helped bring him a breakthrough in a field in which many other scientists had been unsuccessful.
"It was a fortuitous alignment of the skills I got in soft-matter physics and this big biological problem," he said.
Crocker's idea was to take a technique he had used extensively in his previous physics research and apply it to human cells. He and his team measured the "squishiness" of the cells at various frequencies to determine how their molecules rearrange under pressure.
Although measuring the squishiness of a cell is not in itself a new idea, Crocker's breakthrough was developing a new technique that allowed his team to obtain much more reliable data.
"We sort of pushed the limits," he said. His team has combined existing technologies to make one of the best light microscopes possible today.
As a result, Crocker has formed a more accurate picture of the structure of the human cell than had previously been possible.
The deformation of human cells under stress has led him to suspect the existence of "cross-linking" molecules in the outer cell skeletons. These molecules, Crocker said, act as shape sensors for the cell and allow it to respond to changes in its environment.
If his suspicions prove to be correct, there could be big implications for research in the fields of oncology and tissue engineering.
The ability of the cross-linking molecules to sense their environment could help explain why cells do not always behave as expected when placed in unfamiliar environments.
However, Crocker admits that a lot of work remains to be done before his research can be usefully applied to medicine.
"The research is starting to gel -- we are at the end of the beginning," he said. "We've had the big breakthrough, but proving it is the hard part."
Nevertheless, after a couple of false starts, Crocker is confident that his team is finally on track.
"Our current theory passed every test we could throw at it," he said with a smile. "It even passed the laugh test -- the test where you tell your idea to someone outside of your community and see whether they laugh or not."
