The Department of PSYCHOLOGY at the UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, invites applications for a full-time, nine-month, tenure-accruing, OPEN-AREA Assistant Professor with special emphasis in QUANTITATIVE METHODS, beginning August 16, 2024. We encourage applications from any research orientation in psychology and the position is open to candidates who employ a wide variety of methodological tools or approaches (including, but not limited to, computational modeling, statistics, artificial intelligence, structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, network analysis, and longitudinal data analysis). Applicants will be expected to maintain an outstanding program of research with high potential for external funding, teach psychology graduate and undergraduate courses, advise students, and provide service to the institution.

This talk aims to show how new physical methods can advance biological and biomedical research. A major advance in physical chemistry in the last two decades has been the development of quantitative methods to directly observe individual molecules in solution, attached to surfaces, in the membrane of live cells or more recently inside live cells. These single-molecule fluorescence studies have now reached a stage where they can provide new insights into important biological problems. After presenting the principles of these methods, I will give some examples from our current research to probe the molecular basis of neurodegeneration. Here we have used single-molecule fluorescence to detect and analyse the low concentrations of soluble protein aggregates thought to be responsible for Alzheimer’s disease and determine the mechanisms by which they damage neurons. Lastly, I will describe how fundamental science aimed at watching single molecules incorporating nucleotides into DNA gave rise to a new rapid method to sequence DNA that is now widely used.