Cell adhesion century: culture breakthrough

Kevin Kendall gained his PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory in 1970 for studies of contact and friction supervised by Professor David Tabor FRS. He then worked at British Railways in Derby on adhesion of iron oxide nanoparticles and became interested in fracture of adhesive joints, co-authoring the JKR paper with Johnson and Roberts. After post-docs in Australia and USA, he joined ICI in Runcorn and continued to pursue both theory and application of particle adhesion and cracking of polymers, cements and ceramics. Later he was Professor at Keele and Birmingham, where he started the ceramic fuel cell spin-out company Adelan Ltd, based on thermal-shock resistant zirconia.

Costantino Creton graduated in Materials Science from the EPFL (Switzerland) in 1985. He then obtained his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University (USA). After a post-doc at the IBM Almaden Research Center (USA), he joined the ESPCI ParisTech first as a post-doctoral associate in 1993 and, since 1994 as a C.N.R.S. permanent researcher. He was promoted CNRS research director (equivalent to Professor) in 2001and since 2009, he is coordinating the research activities of the Soft Polymer Networks research group of the laboratory. He holds also since 2011 the position of scientific chairman of the Performance Polymers technology area of the Dutch Polymer Institute.  He has published more than 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals, nine book chapters, more than 100 conference proceedings and has given more than 70 invited and plenary lectures at international conferences.

Florian Rehfeldt, born in 1975 in Munich, Germany, studied Physics at the Technische Universität München (TUM) in Germany and received his PhD in Physics in 2005 for his work on “Novel Ultrathin Polymer Films as Biomimetic Interfaces” working with Prof. Dr. Motomu Tanaka and Prof. Dr. Erich Sackmann at the Institute for Biophysics E22. In 2006, he moved to University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to work with Prof. Dr. Dennis E. Discher on cell mechanics and the design of biomimetic hydrogels as in vitro culture systems with well-defined elasticity and was awarded a Feodor-Lynen-fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation. He returned to Germany end of 2008 and worked as a senior post-doctoral fellow in the 3rd Institute of Physics – Biophysics directed by Prof. Dr. Christoph F. Schmidt at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. Since 2011 he is leading the Cell & Matrix Mechanics group in this institute and aims at elucidating the complex interplay of mechanics and biochemistry determining cell behavior.

Gabriel Waksman obtained his PhD in 1982 from the University of Paris. After a short spell in industry and a postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University in New York, he joined the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine (St Louis, USA) in 1993. In 2000, he became the Alumni Endowed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and in 2002 was appointed the first Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. In 2003, he moved to London (UK) to take up the Joint Chair of Structural and Molecular Biology at University College London and Birkbeck College London. The same year, he was awarded a Wolfson-Royal Society Merit Award and was appointed the Head of the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology at UCL/Birkbeck. In 2006, he was appointed to the Courtauld Chair in Biochemistry at UCL, became Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (now Research Department of Structural and Molecular Biology) at UCL and was appointed Head of the School of Crystallography (now Department of Biological Sciences) at Birkbeck. He was elected to EMBO in 2007, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2008, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012, and a member of the German Academy of Sciences in 2013, He maintains an active research programme in the Structural and Molecular Biology of Bacterial Secretion Systems funded by a senior investigator award from the Wellcome Trust, an Advanced ERC grant, and a programme grant from MRC.

Dr Walter Federle is a Senior Lecturer for Integrative and Comparative Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, UK. Following his Diploma in Biology he obtained his PhD in 1998 from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, and the University of California, Berkeley, USA, as well as at the University of Würzburg. Since joining the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge in 2005, his research has focused on the role of mechanical factors in insect-plant interactions, as well as on animal biomechanics and the biophysics of biological adhesion.