PhD student Jason Samaroo of the Larkin Lab was recently selected for a project with The Poetry of Science, an initiative directed by the Cambridge Arts Council in which poets and scientists of color from the Cambridge area collaborate to create poetry for a public art installation centered around science, poetry, and racial social justice. Through this collaboration with the Poetry of Science, Jason is hoping to further understanding of the relationship between life and art, analogous to the perspectives of science and poetry.
The project offers scientists the opportunity to speak about their work in new and creative forms of writing, and allows poets and scientists to bridge the gap between the sciences and humanities while also strengthening links between distinct communities of color. A local photographer will also create portraits of the scientists in their field of study.
The poems will be presented at the Boston Lit Crawl on June 10th at the Starlight Space in Central Square, Cambridge and will also be published in a special edition of Spry Literary Journal. Both the poems and portraits will be printed and publicly installed at local businesses in the Cambridge area later this summer. Further information about this project can be found on The Poetry of Science website.
Jason conducts research on the biophysical properties of microbial communities. Microbes encounter many different environments: the soil, ocean, animal intestines, etc. To thrive in these environments, they must employ biological and physical strategies to address self-organization—more specifically, what cell-to-cell or cell-to-environment information is necessary for successful formation of microbial communities. A clear understanding of how the emergent patterns, intrinsic to life, originate from cells would show us how living things have spread across the whole planet.
Bacterial cells can differentiate into many fates, much like the cells in our bodies. For example, they can become motile and move dynamically, or matrix producing, and aid in surface adhesion. Jason aims to investigate the role that physical interactions between cells, and gene regulation within cells, play in the emergence of colony-level behaviors that make bacteria successful in every habitat on earth.
Bacterial communities that stick to surfaces such as plant roots and medical devices are called biofilms. Once a group of cells adheres together to form a multicellular biofilm, it becomes a living material in which forces can be transmitted to shape colonies and alter cellular states. Using the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis as a model, Jason seeks to find how localized forces create emergent patterns that give biofilms new strategies to thrive in harsh environments. In this way, a school of thought is formed in which biofilm formation can be thought of like the development of an organism: as cells grow, stick together and unstick, local forces create movements and three-dimensional structures that become anatomy.
Congratulations, Jason!