Ben Kuznets-Speck

2022-2023 Graduate Student Fellow

Previous Faculty Advisor: Professor David Limmer

Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

ben_kuznets-speck@berkeley.edu

Ben was a member of the biophysics graduate group and was mentored by David Limmer. His research focused on developing a practical framework to understand how noisy complex physical systems utilize nonequilibrium forces to regulate their speed of function.

He employed theory and computation to investigate how nanoscale proteins channel forces exerted on them during biosynthesis and various cellular maintenance processes to accelerate large-scale structural rearrangements. Ben collaborated with the Bustamante lab, where they conducted direct measurements of nonequilibrium forces and the nanoscale conformational changes induced through single-molecule optical tweezing experiments. Together with the Bustamante group, Ben studied a model protein to elucidate how folding and force distribution occur among its modular subunits. To characterize emergent intermediate states on the folding pathway, Ben used amino-acid level simulations to track how energy dissipation propagated along the protein backbone under different experimental forcing protocols.