Michael Zwolak is the Group Leader of Biophysical and Biomedical Measurement at NIST. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech on the use of tensor networks to simulate many-body quantum systems, as well as B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Philosophy from Virginia Tech. After stints as a Feynman Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a faculty member of the Department of Physics at Oregon State University, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now within the Biophysical and Biomedical Measurement Group, he leads efforts in precision measurement and simulation across multiple time- and length- scales of the biological hierarchy to discover fundamental principles of molecular physiology.
Michael has made seminal contributions to the theory of molecular and nanofluidic devices, self-assembly, and biomolecular metrology, including setting the theoretical foundations for rapid DNA sequencing with electronic sensors embedded in fluidic devices and discovering a scaling theory to capture quantitative behavior of ionic transport within all-atom molecular dynamics. His current focus is on developing scalable, manufacturable sensors for biomolecular diagnostics and illuminating molecular physiology, as well as advancing the state of the art in biomolecular simulation and machine learning.