Physics’ Rana Ashkar named 2025 Sloan Research Fellow
Without membranes to surround and protect cells, life as we know it would not exist. For physicist Rana Ashkar, cell membranes are more than vital — they are inspirational.
Recent discoveries from Ashkar’s lab have bridged a crucial information gap in membrane biophysics. Her paradigm-shifting discoveries led to her selection as a 2025 Sloan Research Fellow.
The Sloan Research Fellowship, granted annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955, recognizes exceptional early career researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments have the potential to revolutionize their areas of study.
“This is a testament to my group’s efforts in combining biophysical principles with transformative applications in drug delivery and artificial cell technologies,” said Ashkar, assistant professor in the Department of Physics. “It recognizes the exciting possibilities that our findings open on fundamental and practical levels.”
The Sloan Fellowship is highly competitive: more than 1,000 researchers are nominated each year from across the U.S. and Canada, and of those, only 126 fellows were named this year. Ashkar is the seventh Virginia Tech researcher to receive this award and the second in the physics department after John Condon in 1977.
Ashkar is applying cutting-edge techniques to uncover the physical principles dictating membrane functions over different scales in space and time and across a rich diversity in composition. Her lab is translating such principles into design rules for synthetic systems that can benefit human life and future technologies.
“They are amazing systems to study, both to learn lessons from biology and to understand the design rules that nature has perfected over billions of years,” said Ashkar.
Ashkar’s work has opened new avenues of research by demonstrating that cell membranes can have different dynamic responses depending on the length and time scale.
Theories predicting that materials could have different properties on distinct scales date back to the early 1900s. But the realization of these concepts in biomembranes was only enabled by Ashkar’s recent results through experimental methods that can probe scales as small as a few hundred nanometers and as fast as a few hundred nanoseconds.
“Our findings imply that biomembranes could exhibit entirely new material and functional properties at each scale,” Ashkar said. “This has profound implications in understanding biological function and designing synthetic systems with life-like behavior.”
