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Position Governing Body Fellow
School Physical Sciences Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
Email yyjc2@cam.ac.uk
Department link

Jane is an experimentalist looking to unravel the mysteries of the living world using an interdisciplinary approach, blending biology, physics, and engineering. Her current research interests are centred on the biomechanics of motility at the microscale, specifically ciliated tissues.

Jane received her Bachelor of Applied Sciences in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, majoring in Energy and the Environment. She continued her academic journey at MIT, where she completed both her master’s and doctoral degrees in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She studied the effects of hydrodynamic instabilities on mixing and expanded her work to include a dimension to her experiments that is ubiquitous to any environment: bacteria. Continuing her newfound fascination with the interplay between fluid dynamics and living things, and especially the collective behaviour of microorganisms, she is now a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Junior Research Fellow at ��Vlog�ٷ�.

Her current research focuses on the biomechanics of motility at the microscale, specifically in understanding the mechanisms involved in the synchronisation (or lack thereof) of cilia. Cilia are hair-like structures found across a large range of organisms, and their collective beating enables important functions, such as algae travelling through the earth’s oceans or mucus clearing via fluid flow generation in the human lung.

An experimentalist at heart, Jane has an affinity for cameras and imaging of all types, from high-speed capture of cilia beating in synchrony to action shots of a heron taking off into the sunset. She also strongly believes in building a strong science community from the ground up, and so actively participates in mentoring across all academic levels (high school, undergraduate, and graduate), and regularly supervises student research projects. She is also on the organising committee for the Fluid Mechanics Seminar Series, conducted in partnership with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, the UK Fluids Network (Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics), and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.