David R. Nelson

About

David R. Nelson is the Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. His primary teaching area is Applied Physics. His research areas include Applied Mathematics, Active Matter, Modeling of Physical and Biological Phenomena and Systems, and Biomaterials. His work involves studying how curved surfaces dramatically alter the shape of crystals, which has implications for coatings, drug delivery systems, and understanding how viruses assemble.

Research topics

• Physics
• Condensed matter physics
• Materials science
• Biology
• Geology

Selected publications

• Antagonism between killer yeast strains as an experimental model for biological nucleation dynamics

  eLife · 2021-12-06 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  Antagonistic interactions are widespread in the microbial world and affect microbial evolutionary dynamics. Natural microbial communities often display spatial structure, which affects biological interactions, but much of what we know about microbial antagonism comes from laboratory studies of well-mixed communities. To overcome this limitation, we manipulated two killer strains of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae , expressing different toxins, to independently control the rate at whic…

  PublisherDOI

• Buckling and metastability in membranes with dilation arrays

  Physical review. E · 2020-09-10 · 19 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We study periodic arrays of impurities that create localized regions of expansion, embedded in two-dimensional crystalline membranes. These arrays provide a simple elastic model of shape memory. As the size of each dilational impurity increases (or the relative cost of bending to stretching decreases), it becomes energetically favorable for each of the M impurities to buckle up or down into the third dimension, thus allowing for of order 2^{M} metastable surface configurations corresponding to d…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The collective effect of finite-sized inhomogeneities on the spatial spread of populations in two dimensions

  Journal of The Royal Society Interface · 2021-10-01 · 16 citations

  preprintOpen access

  The dynamics of a population expanding into unoccupied habitat has been primarily studied for situations in which growth and dispersal parameters are uniform in space or vary in one dimension. Here, we study the influence of finite-sized individual inhomogeneities and their collective effect on front speed if randomly placed in a two-dimensional habitat. We use an individual-based model to investigate the front dynamics for a region in which dispersal or growth of individuals is reduced to zero…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Defect absorption and emission for <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>p</mml:mi></mml:math>-atic liquid crystals on cones

  Physical review. E · 2022-08-12 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author

  We investigate the ground-state configurations of two-dimensional liquid crystals with $p$-fold rotational symmetry ($p$-atics) on fixed curved surfaces. We focus on the intrinsic geometry and show that isothermal coordinates are particularly convenient as they explicitly encode a geometric contribution to the elastic potential. In the special case of a cone with half-angle $\ensuremath{\beta}$, the apex develops an effective topological charge of $\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\chi}$, where $2\ensu…

  PublisherDOI

• Fractional defect charges in liquid crystals with <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>p</mml:mi></mml:math>-fold rotational symmetry on cones

  Physical review. E · 2022-05-31 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Conical surfaces, with a δ function of Gaussian curvature at the apex, are perhaps the simplest example of geometric frustration. We study two-dimensional liquid crystals with p-fold rotational symmetry (p-atics) on the surfaces of cones. For free boundary conditions at the base, we find both the ground state(s) and a discrete ladder of metastable states as a function of both the cone angle and the liquid crystal symmetry p. We find that these states are characterized by a set of fractional defe…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• DMREF/Collaborative Research: Graphene Based Origami and Kirigami Metamaterials

  NSF · $360k · 2014–2019

• Theoretical Problems in Soft Matter and Quantitative Biology

  NSF · $405k · 2010–2013

• NIH Grant P50GM068763

  NIH · $24.4M · 2014

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew W. Murray

  Harvard University

  43 shared

• Wladyslaw Altermann

  37 shared

• Marta Gomez‐Chiarri

  30 shared

• Yariv Kafri

  29 shared

• Gary H. Wikfors

  Rogers (United States)

  28 shared

• Kirill S. Korolev

  Boston University

  24 shared

• David Rowley

  University of Rhode Island

  24 shared

• Federico Toschi

  Eindhoven University of Technology

  22 shared

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Microbiology and Immunology

  University of California Berkeley

  1982

• Ph.D., Microbiology

  University of California Los Angeles

  1979

• M.S., Bacteriology

  University of Wisconsin Madison

  1974

• A.B., Bacteriology

  University of California Los Angeles

  1972

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Amir Yacobyh-92
• Evelyn Huh-72
• Robert M. Westervelth-44