Chemical and biomolecular engineering graduate student Devinda Wijewardena received the Student Research Achievement Award for his poster presentation at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Los Angeles. Wijewardena’s poster was titled "Insights into back-steps, rotations, and cargo-size effects of kinesin motility with MINFLUX." His poster highlighted new understandings of kinesin biomechanics stepping utilizing minimum photon fluxes microscopy to explore the implications of negative diffusion of kinesin feet and the c-terminus behavior of kinesin attached cargo.
Originally from Sri Lanka, Wijewardena received the prestigious University Distinguished Scholarship from the Honors College of Michigan State University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He is currently a graduate student in the Selvin group, researching single-molecule microscopic tracking and spectroscopic techniques. In addition to ChBE, he is affiliated with the Department of Physics and the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Quantitative Cell Biology.