About

Hello! I’m Layne. I am a physical scientist interested in the assembly, organization, and dynamics of nanoscale, biomolecular, and active materials. I develop and use tools of statistical mechanics, molecular simulation, and machine learning to uncover both the general principles and specific mechanisms of collective organization in diverse systems. Please browse this website using the headers above to learn more about my research and teaching.

Education

I received my Sc.B. in Chemical Physics from Brown University. I completed my undergraduate thesis on liquid crystal dynamics with Richard Stratt. Subsequently, I earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley, working with Phill Geissler to study chemical transformations of nanocrystals. From August 2020 to May 2022 I was a postdoctoral fellow at NIH with Robert Best developing tools to understand protein folding and fold-switching using models of sequence coevolution.

Current Research

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher with Michael Hagan and Aparna Baskaran at Brandeis University, where I study the active assembly of soft materials, as well as virus assembly and encapsidation.