F E AT U R E S TO R Y


LeDuc Spearheads Effort to Establish Carnegie Mellon Leadership


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n October, Professor Philip LeDuc announced the formation of an important new initiative at Carnegie Mellon, the Center for the Mechanics and Engineering of Cellular Systems. This interdisciplinary effort will bring together more than 20 faculty from across the University —including engineers, life scientists, chemists, physicists, and computational experts. They will work collaboratively to achieve a better understanding of the complex mechanical interactions in integrated biological systems at the molecular, cellular, and multicellular scales. “Living systems interact with their environment in a tremendous diversity of ways,” says LeDuc. “Mechanical signals are now recognized as a major mechanism of communication that can influence cell migration, growth, and differentiation. People think about mechanics in the body in terms of the heart pumping, or muscles and bones moving, but cell mechanics encompasses a much greater range than just these examples.” According to LeDuc, the vision of the Center is that a comprehensive under- standing of the input and output of mechanical signals inside living cells—and between cells and their environment—can lead to improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases, as well as birth defects and aging.


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