Anil Kumar Dasanna

... is a theoretical physicist working on biophysics and soft matter physics. He did his Masters in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras (Chennai, India). He received his doctorate in biophysics from Universite Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France), during which he worked with Prof. Manoel Manghi and Prof. Nicolas Destainville in the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics on the dynamics of dsDNA bubbles. After his PhD, he joined Prof. Ulrich Schwarz in Heidelberg University for postdoctoral studies where he studied various biophysical aspects in malaria pathogenesis and explored the importance of cell adhesion in the context of malaria blood stage infections. Afterwards, he joined Dr. Dmitry Fedosov and Prof. Gerhard Gompper in the Forschungszentrum Jülich and studied multiple aspects of the physics of red blood cells, malaria biophysics, and blood sedimentation. At present, he is working as a postdoctoral scientist in Saarland University with Prof. Heiko Reiger focusing on aspects of cell mechanics and migration.

My research focuses on understanding the physics of biological and soft matter systems. In particular, my current interests are in malaria biophysics, cell mechanics, and cell migration. My primary tools include computer simulations and numerical approaches using coarse-grained descriptions to reach reasonable length and time scales. For instance, the cellular membrane is modelled as a two-dimentional triangulated meshwork with prescribed elastic moduli and the fluid is modelled with mesoscopic particle-based techniques, either multi-particle collision dynamics or dissipative particle dynamics.

This research is Project 2 of the SPP 2332.