Dr Ruby Peters
College Research Associate
SpecialisationSuper-resolution microscopy, mechanobiology, biophysics
Research interestsAfter completing a PhD in Physics at King’s College London in 2019, Dr Ruby Peters joined the lab of Professor Ewa Paluch at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. Her doctoral research, whilst formally granted in the discipline of Physics, was highly interdisciplinary spanning the fields of cell biology, optics, computational biology and biophysics. She is a specialist in super-resolution microscopy: a family of closely related techniques that bypass the classical diffraction limit of light and allows for the visualisation of single molecules within cells. Specifically, during her PhD she developed a number of algorithms for the analysis of super-resolution datasets of the actin cytoskeleton during the human immune response. At the Paluch lab, she studies cell-shape control in the context of the nanoscale organisation and dynamics of the actomyosin cortex. Despite its importance, our understanding of cell-shape regulation remains limited, owing to the across-scales and across-disciplines nature of morphogenesis studies. By using state of the art microscopy and computational approaches, She aims to connect the nanoscale interactions that occur within the actomyosin cortex to the mechanical properties of the entire cell during fundamental cell-shape changes, thereby bridging the length scales gap from the nanoscopic to the microscopic.