news
Sept 21-15, 2026
AHS gave a talk and Kavya presented a poster at the single molecule FRET conference in Tutzing, Germany. It was extra exciting to attend the single-molecule FRET 30 year anniversary conference!
Aug 23-27, 2026
Ryan Febryanto and Kavya Vaidya gave talks at ACS 2026 in Chicago in the Advances in spectroscopy session. Well done!
Jul 23-25, 2026
Squires lab attended the 2026 Midwest Single Workshop in force! Maya, Kavya, Andres, Ryan, Emily, Connor, Sarah, Jon, Leslie, and Mrunal all presented posters and Allison gave a talk. It was great to connect with the Midwest single molecule community and we hope to attend future workshops.
June 25, 2026
Squires lab hosts a social at the Promontory Point to welcome our new members Leslie, Mrunal, Min, Robyn, and Austin!
June 15, 2026
The Squires lab welcomes four undergraduate students for the summer! Robyn Kopeny (Tulane University, PME REU) working with Andres on characterizing nanodiamonds. Min Zi-Jie (National Tsing Hua University, UChicago-Taiwan Student Exchange Program) working with Ryan on FRETFluors. Austin Hyde (University of Chicago, PME) joins us for his first summer, working on integrating ALEX into our widefield microscope setup. Brandon Bryant (University of Chicago, PME) joins us for his third summer, working with Maya on protein condensates.
June 1, 2026
Dr. Leslie Castillo joins the Squires lab as a post-doc! Leslie earned her Ph.D. at Loyola University working with Colin Gates, focusing on the regulation of inorganic cofactors across electron transport in photosystem II. She will be working on photoprotective mechanisms of phycobilisomes.
Mar 23, 2026
We are excited to welcome Dr. Mrunal Kamble to the Squires Lab. Dr. Kamble's expertise is in the quantum applications of two-mode bright squeezed light in quantum sensing, and she will be working on single-qubit detection and spectroscopy.
Mar 6, 2026
Connor Sandall, PME Ph. D. student, joins the Squires lab! He comes to us from the University of Virginia where he earned a Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering. Connor will be working on the FRETfluors project and will be collaborating with David Pincus.
Feb 21-25, 2026
Squires lab was well represented at BPS in San Francisco. Kepler, Jon, and Ryan presented posters on their recent work and Sarah was selected to give a platform talk along with a poster. Allison co-chaired the Nanoscale Approaches to Biology Symposium. Looking forward to next year in Philadelphia!
Jan 21, 2026
The Squires Lab contributed to a University of York Paper on the conformational changes of DNA Helicase Rep domains. It uses TCSPC, FCS, smFRET, ABEL, and MDS to provide temporal and spatial resolution of Rep's domain movements. Read More
Jan 17, 2026
Maya gave a talk on her research at the Midwest Stress conference at Northwestern University. She presented on orphan ribosomal protein condensates and their regulation. Well done Maya!
Jan 5, 2026
Dr. Jonathan Montgomery joins the Squires lab as a post-doc! John earned his Ph.D. at The Ohio State University working with Mark Foster, focusing on protein structure and dynamics using NMR. He will be studying heat shock proteins in collaboration with the Drummond lab.
Dec 9, 2025
Squires Lab comes in 2nd Place in Lab Safety Jeopardy; well done, team! Thank you to the Joint Research Safety Initiative and PME for putting on a great event.
Oct 7, 2025
First author Ayesha Ejaz published her work on understanding the mechanism by which the orange carotenoid protein quenches a phycobilisome with a penta-cylindrical core. This work, undertaken in collaboration with the Kerfeld Lab at MSU / LBNL, was just published in PNAS.
Oct 5, 2025
To celebrate the start of Fall, the Squires lab went on an apple picking adventure to Indiana.
Oct 4, 2025
Congratulations to Ryan for winning a Spark award from Biohub Chicago! This award supports year-long student-led collaborative research projects. Ryan will join forces with Sarah Asif from the Gillette lab at UIUC to work on their proposed project, "Multiplexed Single-Molecule Sensing for Characterizing the Circadian Dynamics of Neuroinflammation in Prothrombotic Stroke Models.”
Oct 4, 2025
Squires Lab members Kepler Domurat-Sousa, Emily Nakayama, and Maya Igarashi volunteered at the 2025 South Side Science Festival by teaching local families about optics and photophysics. Their table was busy all day!
July 18, 2025
Dr. Lin successfully defended his dissertation titled “Molecular-Level Interrogation and Visualization of how Chaperones Disperse Heat-Induced Protein Condensates”. He will be returning to the Pritzker School of Medicine as an M2 to complete his M.D./Ph.D. program; good luck becoming a double doctor, Kyle!
July, 2025
Emily Nakayama, Biophysics Ph.D. student, joins the Squires lab! She comes to us from Johns Hopkins University where she earned her B.S. in Biophysics. Emily will be working on phycobilisome quenching and photoadaptation, and will be co-advised by Prof. Mike Rust.
Jun, 01, 2025
Congratulations to Maya McDaniel for graduating from UChicago with a B.S. in Molecular Engineering! She successfully defended her honors undergraduate thesis on Radiation-Induced Diarythelene Switching Mechanisms. Maya will be starting her Ph.D. in Materials Science at the University of Michigan in September.
May 15, 2025
Our newest work is now published in Nature Nanotechnology. In collaboration with the Drummond lab, first authors Jiachong Chu and Ayesha Ejaz worked to develop and characterize over two dozen composite fluorescent labels, called FRETfluors, that enable multiplexed spectroscopic measurements at the single-molecule level. Read More
April 17, 2025
The Squires lab is honored to official join the James Franck Institute. We are delighted to be part of this vibrant community of interdisciplinary researchers and look forward to continued conversations and collaborations with our colleagues. Learn More
April 10, 2025
Dr. Ejaz successfully defended her dissertation titled “Leveraging Natural and Engineered Energy Transfer Constructs in an Anti-Brownian Electrokinetic (ABEL) Trap for Multiplexed Sensing and Structural Characterization”. Next up: Dr. Ejaz will be starting a post-doctoral fellowship at CZ Biohub Chicago, working with Dr. Minjun Son.
March 11, 2025
Raihan Febryanto, PME Ph.D. student, joins the Squires lab! He comes to us from Tohoku University where he earned a Bachelor's in Applied Marine Biology. Ryan will be co-advised by Prof. Samantha Riesenfeld, and his research will focus on applications and information theory for FRETfluors.
Feb 11, 2025
Dr. Chu successfully defended her dissertation titled “Engineering FRET-Based Labels for Multiplexed Single-Molecule Sensenig”. Next up: Dr. Chu will be starting at SpearBio as a Research Scientist.
Jan 5-10, 2025
Congratulations to Kavya, who was recently awarded the Martin and Beate Block Award for her research on engineering FRET in DNA origami systems. The Block Award is given to recognize the work of a promising junior physicist during the Aspen Single-Molecule Biophysics conference, and is accompanied by a merit-based scholarship. The conference highlights advancements in experimental and theoretical single-molecule biophysics.
November 19, 2024
AHS and collaborators from Stanford and The Ohio State University published a perspective article on the development and utility of interferometric scattering for spectroscopic studies of photosynthetic light-harvesting systems. Read More
August 19, 2024
The Squires lab is excited to collaborate with David Pincus and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study cellular responses to stress across time- and length-scales. The team has been awarded an RM1 grant by NIH-NIGMS to create the Cellular Adaptation Lab, which seeks to establish unified framework for cellular adaptation. Read More
June, 2024
Congratulations to AHS, who was just selected for the DOE Early Career Award. This grant, awarded through Basic Energy Sciences - Photosynthetic Systems is dedicated to understanding the sophisticated mechanisms by which photosynthetic bacteria protect themselves from rapid changes in solar illumination. The results of this work could inspire biomimetic strategies to improve solar energy technologies.
June, 2024
AHS and our collaborator, Prof. Samantha Riesenfeld, have been selected as Chan-Zuckerberg Investigators at Biohub Chicago! They will receive funding over three years to develop a new platform for biomarker detection. Read more here.
April 11, 2024
Kyle Lin and AHS contributed to a Drummond Lab Paper on stress triggered condensation, its evolution, and its tuning. Using budding yeast, they showed that proteome-scale biomolecular condensation is tuned to species-specific thermal niches. This project exemplifies the power of single molecule research techniques when applied to biomolecular condensates. Way to go, team!
April, 2024
Sarah Christensen has been awarded the NSERC PGS-D graduate fellowship to research actin monomer binding proteins and their effect on actin assembly. Sarah is co-advised by AHS and Prof. David Kovar. Congratulations, Sarah!
April, 2024
Maya Igarashi has been awarded an NSF-GRFP graduate fellowship to support her research on chaperone-regulated orphan ribosomal protein condensates in eukaryotes. Maya is co-advised by AHS and Prof. David Pincus. Congratulations to Maya!
Feb 28, 2024
Our manuscript on multi-point laser patterning of self-polymerizing materials is now published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces (doi: 10.1021/acsami.4c00216). Led by first author Andrés Cook, we demonstrated and developed a predictive design framework for near-arbitrary patterning of peaks and seams in 2-D polymers. Congrats to the whole team, including Trevor, Kavya, AHS, and our collaborators Dr. Justin Jureller and members of the Esser-Kahn Group!
Feb 21, 2024
Dana organized and moderated a Fireside Chat for the Society of Women Engineers with Prof. Squires. We had a great time chatting over Medici sandwiches about career paths in research, and exchanged tips on how to navigate undergraduate courses, apply to and pick a graduate program, and troubleshoot uncooperative experiments.
Feb 10, 2024
The Squires Group was well-represented at the Biophysical Society Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. Ayesha, Kyle, Kavya, Trevor, Sarah, Maya, and Dana all (!!!) presented posters on their recent work, and Jiachong was selected to give a platform talk along with a poster. Dana won the Undergraduate Poster Award Competition for her poster presentation! Prof. Squires spoke in the Nanoscale Approaches to Biology Symposium, which she'll co-chair next year. Great job, team!
Jan 3, 2024
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Aria Coraor to the Squires Group. Dr. Coraor is an expert in molecular dynamics and machine-learning-assisted simulations of single-molecule interactions, and will be working to simulate and understand the signals we measure from nanoscale FRET constructs.
December 15, 2023
Andres's preprint is up on arXiv: Polymer patterning by laser-induced multi-point initiation of frontal polymerization. Together with Trevor, Kavya, and our collaborators Dr. Justin Jureller and members of the Esser-Kahn Group, we built an instrument to create near-arbitrary spatial patterns in self-polymerizing materials, and developed a theoretical framework to predict these patterns.
December 9, 2023
The Squires lab had a busy table at Physics With a BANG! 2023. In the photo, Maya, Sarah, and Kepler are demonstrating the principles of laser operation, atomic spectral lines, and diffraction, and showing off the "Minecraft Anti-Brownian Entity Localization (MABEL) Trap", an ABEL Trap simulation that Kepler built entirely in Minecraft.
August 21, 2023
Ayesha and AHS presented new work at SPIE Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation XX in San Diego. AHS's talk and Ayesha's poster focused on their work with Kavya to develop dynamic illumination strategies, including pulsed interleaved excitation, for the ABEL Trap. Check out the crowd at Ayesha's poster, for which she won the OTOM XX poster award - way to go, Ayesha!
July 7, 2023
Prof. Squires is honored to receive the PIERS Young Scientist Award. She will present our latest research results on multiplexing single-molecule measurements when she is awarded the prize at PIERS 2023 in Prague. Way to go, team!
July 3, 2023
Jiachong and Ayesha's co-authored preprint is now up on arXiv: Single-molecule fluorescence multiplexing by multi-parameter spectroscopic detection of nanostructured FRET labels. Together with Kyle, Maddie, Aria, and our collaborator Allan Drummond, we used FRET and site- and attachment-specific photophysical properties to engineer dozens of nanostructures that are uniquely distinguishable at the single-molecule level.
June 15, 2023
It's official - Maya and Sarah are joining the Squires Group. Maya will work on a project in collaboration with the Pincus Lab, and Sarah be starting up a new collaboration with the Kovar Lab. Welcome!
June 4, 2023
Congratulations to Olivia, who is graduating summa cum laude in PME after completing her honors undergraduate thesis in our lab this spring. The group celebrated this weekend with a potluck and games on Promontory Point. Next stop for Olivia: NYU's Grossman School of Medicine. Best wishes to you, Oliva; we'll miss you!
June 1, 2023
Roy Hays and Mallie Fitzgerald are joining the Squires Group for Summer 2023. Roy will work with Trevor and Andres on particle manipulation, and Mallie will join Kavya in spectroscopic studies of quantum dot photophysics. We're excited to work with you - welcome!
May 11, 2023
Kepler and Maya's preprint with our collaborators in the Frisch and La Riviere labs is now up on arXiv: Simulation of a low-Z-medium detector for low-dose high-resolution TOF-PET. Their simulations predict that a novel fluorescence-based detector material could be used for high resolution PET scans at a fraction of a standard radioactive dose to patients.
May, 2023
Dana was named as an IBD Scholar to do research in our lab this summer. She will continue her work imaging protein condensate disaggregation by molecular chaperones to help understand the molecular mechanisms by which cells recover from stress. Nice job, Dana!
May 23, 2023
The UChicago Physics department has selected Kepler and his collaborator Cameron Poe (Frisch Lab) to receive the Nathan Sugarman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. The award recognizes "...their ground-breaking work as a team developing Compton-based Time-of-Flight Positron-Emission Tomography cameras capable of reducing the radiation dose to patients by factors up to 1000". Congratulations, Kepler and Cam!
April 28, 2023
Our group had a great time exchanging tips, tricks, and new results with our neighbors at the 2nd Annual Biophysics Student Symposium hosted here in Chicago by teams from UIC. Jiachong gave a short talk, and Dana won the Best Poster award for her work (way to go, Dana!).
March 21, 2023
Kyle has been selected by the NIH to receive an F30 predoctoral fellowship for his dissertation work! The title of his proposal is "Investigating Biomolecular Condensates and Heat Shock Proteins in Cellular Responses to Sublethal Heat Shock and Fever". Congratulations, Kyle!
March 28, 2023
Jiachong gave a talk on her research at the American Chemical Society's Spring Meeting held in Indianapolis, IN. She showed our recent progress engineering spectroscopic labels for multiplexing fluorescence measurements at the single-molecule level. Nice presentation, Jiachong!
November 10, 2022
Olivia's work in collaboration with the Pincus lab is now on bioRxiv: Adaptive preservation of orphan ribosomal proteins in chaperone-stirred condensates. In this work we show that newly synthesized ribosomal proteins condense in the nucleolus during cell stress, and that cell recovery after stress depends on a key protein chaperone, Sis1.
September 15, 2022
Welcome to Keturah Mitchell-McCall! Keturah has just joined PME. Manna and Keturah will be working closely together as Keturah transitions into an administrative support role for our group this fall.
September 1, 2022
Andrés and Maya presented research posters at the AVS chapter meeting in Notre Dame, South Bend, IN. Allison gave a short talk. Great, interactive meeting - thanks to Alex Kandel for organizing!
August 5, 2022
George presented his summer research and his teaching module at the QuBBE send-off. He'll be testing out his new curriculum with CPS middle schoolers in his class, and they'll even use his actual image data to practice coding and analysis.
June 4, 2022
Maddie and Joao are graduating this spring. Maddie's off to Northwestern in the fall for a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Joao will head to MIT to get his Ph.D. in Chemistry. Congratulations to you both; we'll miss you!
May 25, 2022
Maya has been awarded a Quad Research Grant by UChicago’s CCRF team for summer research in our group. She will be taking over Joao’s project on photoswitchable dyes. Welcome and way to go, Maya!
February 23, 2022
Jiachong and Ayesha each presented their research posters at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. Allison gave a platform talk on our work. Everyone enjoyed meeting colleagues old and new, and hearing about exciting new biophysics research.