The Marshall University Society of Physics Students and the American Institute of Physics will continue their “Faces of Physics Virtual Speaker Series” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 17, with Dr. Kandice Tanner of the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute. She will speak about “The Physics of Cancer” and her presentation is free and open to all. It will be followed by a question and answer session.
Tanner received her doctoral degree in physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in dynamic imaging of thick tissues. She then became a Department of Defense Breast Cancer Postdoctoral Fellow jointly at University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Dr. Mina J. Bissell.
Tanner joined the National Cancer Institute as a Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator in 2012, where she integrates concepts from molecular biophysics and cell biology to learn how cells and tissues sense and respond to their physical microenvironment, and to thereby design therapeutics and cellular biotechnology. She has been awarded the 2013 National Cancer Institute Director’s Intramural Innovation Award, the 2015 NCI Leading Diversity award, Federal Technology Transfer Awards in 2016 and 2018, the 2016 Young Fluorescence Investigator award from the Biophysical Society and named as a Young Innovator in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering in 2016 by the Biomedical Engineering Society.
“We are so excited and honored to have Dr. Tanner join us for the March installment of the Faces of Physics lecture series,” said Ellie White, a senior physics major who is vice president of Marshall’s Society of Physics Students and a Goldwater Scholar. “I hope that any students who are able to attend this talk, whether at Marshall now or currently in high school or middle school, will be inspired to imagine ways that they could combine their own interests — whether in physics, medicine or entirely different topics — to make a difference in the world as Dr. Tanner is doing right now with her groundbreaking cancer research.”
Virtual audience members will get a chance to pose questions after Tanner’s 30-minute talk on her research. The Faces of Physics talks are held virtually through YouTube Live, are free and open to the public and are appropriate for all ages. To stay up to date on information pertaining to the event, sign up for the mailing list or follow Marshall University Physics on Facebook (@MUPhysicsDept).
Coming up during the spring semester is a presentation by Dr. Pranav Sanghavi of West Virginia University, who will speak at 7 p.m. April 12.
The series is sponsored by the Marshall University Society of Physics Students and the American Institute of Physics. The organizers are SPS President Jackie Sizemore, SPS Vice President Ellie White and SPS Advisor Dr. Sean P. McBride, assistant professor of physics at Marshall.