Lena Koslover, PhD

Elena (Lena) Koslover, PhD, is an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego. Previously, she was in the biophysics program at Stanford University. Her work with Professor Andrew Spakowitz centers on the elastic properties of DNA as they pertain to reading and packaging of the genome. Her research focused on developing analytical and computational models that can bridge different length scales and provide insights into the fundamental physics underlying genome maintenance. She is particularly interested in the compact yet accessible multi-level structure of chromatin, as well as the dynamics of DNA-binding proteins as they locate their target sites, push and pull on the DNA, and help to reshape the genome.

Lena was born in Russia but has spent most of her life in California. She graduated from Caltech in 2006 with BS degrees in mathematics and biology. She went on to spend a year at Cambridge University, where she worked with Dr. David Wales on exploration of energy landscapes for protein folding. She received an MPhil in chemistry from Cambridge in 2007. After that, Lena received her Hertz Fellowship in order to pursue her PhD in physics at Stanford. In 2018, Lena received the Sloan Research Fellowship, whose research centers on the multi-scale physics of intracellular soft matter—from biopolymers to membranes to fluids.