We welcome undergraduates Maya and Vik to the Kasza Lab as part of the Columbia Engineering Summer@SEAS program!

Congrats to all the graduates in the Kasza Lab - Xun Wang, Estevan Mesa, Andrew Pomposelli, and Chaya Hirsch! Our lab was very well represented at Columbia SEAS Class Day. Estevan (as Senior Class President) gave a fantastic speech! Xun was awarded the Graduate Student Life Award!

It was so much fun to co-organize the workshop on Geometry, Topology, and Symmetry in Soft and Living Matter at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics with Alexei Tkachenko, Miranda Holmes-Cerfon, and Oleg Gang. Thank you to all the participants who made it such an engaging workshop! And a huge thank you to the Simons Center for superbly organizing and hosting!

Sassan gave a great poster at the workshop on Geometry, Topology, and Symmetry in Soft and Living Matter at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics!

Karen had a great time virtually visiting the Wesleyan Biology Department to give a seminar! A big thank you to Jennifer Mitchel for the invitation!

A very big congratulations to Andrew Countryman on passing his qualifying exam in the Department of Biomedical Engineering!

Karen is so honored to be recognized as a 2022 Sloan Research Fellow for her work on the mechanics of living matter! A big thank you to all the members of the lab for their creativity and hard work!

Read more here and here.

Marisol gave a talk in a fantastic session on “Mechanical Forces and the 3D Sculpting of Cell-matrix Interactions and Tissues” at Cell Bio Virtual 2021!

Karen gave a seminar in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton. What a fantastic place for my first in-person visit in a long time! It was great meeting so many new folks and seeing old friends too. A big thank you to Celeste Nelson for the invitation!

Cannot believe our first grad student has defended and is moving on to a postdoc at MIT! Congrats Xun!

And what may become a new lab tradition - an embroidered Drosophila melanogaster going away gift. (Hand-stitched by Hannah Lamar Studio.)

Karen gave a virtual seminar as part of the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar Series at Texas A&M University. It was great to get to tell you more about our research. Thank you for the invitation!

Check our new paper in Biophysical Journal on using optogenetics to manipulate myosin-generated mechanical forces in developing embryos! Read the paper here. Read more here.

Congratulations to Xun on very successfully defending his thesis research today! We’re so proud of you Dr. Wang! This is a major milestone for the Kasza Lab - first PhD student graduated!

Congratulations to Mannendri for giving a really excellent final presentation on his research in our lab as part of the Columbia Engineering E.N.G. program! It was such a pleasure having in you in the group this summer!

A huge congratulations to Marisol on being the recipient of a 2021 BWF Career Award at the Scientific Interface! Such an honor! We’re so excited to see what amazing research you do with this tremendous support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund!

Karen gave a virtual talk in the Symposium on the Mechanics of Biological Systems and Materials at the Society for Experimental Mechanics SEM 2021 Annual Conference. So good to see everyone!

Christian and Xun gave great talks at SB3C in the excellent Development and Morphogenesis session co-chaired by Yubing Sun and Victor Varner!

Karen gave a virtual seminar at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. A very big thank you to both Victor Lefèvre and Horacio Espinosa for the invitation and for organizing such an excellent day!

Karen gave a talk in the Developmental Mechanics International Seminar Series. A very big thank you to Ronen Zaidel-Bar for organizing such a superb seminar series and for the invitation to be part of it!