My name is Shixing Wang. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the physics department at Washington University in St. Louis, working at Shankar Mukherji’s lab. I obtained my PhD degree in July 2023 from the same lab, where my research focused on the response and impact of organelles to cellular growth.
My doctoral research involved hyperspectral imaging, with the main project centered around using hyperspectral microscopy to examine six fluorescent protein-tagged organelles within single cells. I currently have a paper under review at Cell Systems, and we are in the process of preparing another manuscript to elucidate our data with a physical model.
Right now, I am cooperating with colleagues in the Biomedical Engineering Department to develop a machine learning model to learn from hyperspectral images and distinguish organelles in bright-field fluorescent microscopy images.
My overarching goal in biology is to identify the defining differences between living and non-living systems, exploring the role of physical laws in selecting length scales across various biological levels. Ultimately, I aspire to contribute to making biology a rigorous subset of physics.
Although my previous experience and interests are more upon experimental cell biology, I also hope to accumulate experience in theory and simulation, and also on the other levels of living systems. The current cell biology is starting to consider organelles as physical objects in real space and paying more attention to spatial and temporal data. With the advances in imaging, fluorescence, and machine learning, I believe the perspectives and methodology in inter-cellular and tissue level research can offer inspiration to lower-level systems.