HARVARD
Materials Research Science and Engineering Center
 
 
 
Graduate Student

Ming Guo
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Ming Guo is a Ph.D. student in the Applied Physics program at Harvard University. Before coming to Harvard, Ming received his bachelor and master degrees in Mechanics at Tsinghua University in China. Since 2008, he has been working in Professor David Weitz's laboratory. Ming is mostly interested in the physics of living matters. He spent several years studying material property and dynamics inside living cells; he has experimentally demonstrated the widely observed intracellular random movements are driven by active stress fluctuations, and gave the first direct quantification of the frequency spectrum of the intracellular forces based on a combination of 'passive' and 'active' tools. More recently, working with Prof. Weitz and several other PIs including Prof. Mooney at Harvard and Prof. Lippincott-Schwartz at NIH, he observes that cells change their volume under different extracellular mechanical environments. He demonstrates that cell stiffness correlates with cell volume, and does not necessarily depend on extracellular matrix stiffness as what people normally think. He also shows that cell volume may control many other aspects of cell behaviors, including stem cell differentiation. Right now, he is seeking more collaborations to study the biological importance of cell volume.