Abstract

Effectively monitoring and managing pain remain major challenges in the clinic and constitute active areas of research today. Given the subjective nature of the pain response and the ongoing opioid crisis, there is a critical need to both identify new non-opioid drug targets for chronic pain management and provide more objective ways to measure pain. Using pain receptors themselves to monitor biomarkers of pain and screen potential channel blockers remains challenging, with current drug screening protocols lacking quantitative and direct measures of receptor function and dysfunction. To improve the treatment and measurement of pain, we describe here the development of prototypical pain biosensors. We utilize in vitro transcription and translation cell-free methods to rapidly express and integrate two distinct and pharmacologically relevant types of pain receptors into membrane-based sensing platforms: the Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channel and pro-algesic P2X purinergic receptors (P2X2), avoiding all the downsides of cell-based expression, isolation, and reconstitution into membranes and sensor platforms. Because these receptors are ligand-gated ion channels activated by different stimuli, we then assess both channels’ responsiveness using electrical or optical methods to monitor changes in ionic flux across the membranes. In our first system, we show that devices containing P2X2 receptors show an increase in ionic flux following ATP administration, indicating ligand-gated channel opening. This ion flux is abolished in the presence of a known P2X2 inhibitor, but not the P2X7 inhibitor, demonstrating the screening potential of this platform to identify new subtype specific therapeutics for pain management. Using the same in vitro expression system, we then cell-free synthesized and integrated the human nociceptor TRPV1 channels into membrane vesicles containing a fluorescence-based ion flux reporter. In these vesicles TRPV1 channel opening could be stimulated by two distinct pain-causing stimuli – heat and capsaicin, showing that in our minimal system, this receptor subtype is responsive to distinct channel activators. The modular nature of these two platforms enables isolation and assessment of individual pain receptors in a way that is not possible using native cells in a convenient, tailorable device compatible with rapid, high throughput screening. Both electrical and optical platforms, which contain cell free synthesized pain receptors, provide new ways to study receptor function and advance our detection and treatment of pain.

Biography

Susan Daniel is the Lisa L. Walker '86 Distinguished Professor, and the William C. Hooey Director of the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. Since becoming director in 2021, she has led the School through a period of significant growth and transformation, advancing research excellence, expanding educational programs, increasing faculty diversity, and championing a vision for engineering education research that is positioning Cornell among the nation's leaders in innovation and student-centered learning.

Daniel leads a research group focused on understanding the functions of cell membranes and the biological processes they govern. Her laboratory pioneered the use of cell-free biomembrane platforms to recreate cellular processes on-chip, enabling fundamental biophysical studies of mammalian, bacterial, and plant cell membranes. Much of her work seeks to advance human health and biotechnology, with her team best known for groundbreaking contributions to understanding viral entry and infection, particularly the protein fusion machinery of coronaviruses and the critical role of calcium in viral infection. More recently, her research has focused on cell-free synthesis of transmembrane proteins for vaccine and biosensing applications. Her research has been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, and elsewhere.

Her scientific contributions have earned broad recognition, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2011), the Schwartz Life Sciences Award (2016), Cornell Engineering's Research Excellence Award (2017), election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2020), and election to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2023). In 2024, she was selected as the prestigious Fan-Tsan Chen Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at National Taiwan University. She also served as co-chair of the 2022 Gordon Research Conference on Bioanalytical Sensors.

A dedicated mentor, Daniel has trained a remarkable cohort of students and researchers. Among her trainees, six have received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, three have become Sloan Fellows, one is a HHMI Gilliam Fellow, and many have participated in competitive NIH-funded training programs. Four have earned the Smith School's highest graduate research honor, the Austin Hooey Award, and four have been recognized as Fleming Scholars, the highest distinction for biomolecular engineering students at Cornell.

As director of the Smith School, Daniel has overseen substantial progress, including a rise in national rankings, significant growth in undergraduate and Master of Engineering enrollments, expanded and renovated research and community spaces in Olin Hall, and strategic faculty hiring that increased representation of women and underrepresented groups while strengthening emerging research areas such as biotechnology, energy storage, and engineering education research.

Throughout her career, Daniel has demonstrated a strong commitment to inclusion, student development, and educational opportunity. As Director of Graduate Studies from 2016 to 2019, she worked to broaden participation in graduate education, helping achieve the most diverse graduate student population in the department's history. In recognition of these efforts, she received Cornell Graduate School's Advanced Career Faculty Champion Award in 2019. She also served for more than a decade as faculty advisor to the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Graduate Women's Group (CBE Women), supporting professional development and leadership opportunities for graduate students. Her leadership has been recognized through the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award, the Zellman Warhaft Award, and the Alice H. Cook Award. She and CBE Women were also recognized by the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN) for creating WOMEN, an outreach program serving tenth-grade girls and their families from rural upstate New York.

Daniel also devoted six years to Cornell's Faculty-in-Residence program during a period of significant North Campus expansion. She served as faculty-in-residence for several first-year residence halls, including as the inaugural faculty-in-residence for Toni Morrison Hall, Ganędagǫ: Hall, and Barbara McClintock Hall. She also led Balch Hall, Cornell's historic all-women residence, where she developed educational programming and intellectual engagement opportunities for 445 students and mentored a generation of young women leaders.

As first-generation college student and first-generation American who gained entry to higher education through the community college system, Daniel grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Inspired by a high school chemistry teacher who nurtured her passion for science, she pursued chemical engineering at Lehigh University, earning her BS, MS, and PhD degrees before completing postdoctoral research in chemistry at Texas A&M University. Early in her career, she had the distinct honor of co-authoring a publication with Nobel Laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, an experience that helped launch her path toward academic research and leadership.

Outside the laboratory and classroom, Daniel enjoys hiking and exploring the natural world. She has completed more than 200 miles of the GR5 trail through the French Alps, hiked in the wilderness of Montana, and regularly seeks new challenges among the peaks of New York's Adirondack Mountains.

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Abstract

Large Amplitude Oscillatory Shear flows (LAOS) provide a versatile and reproducible means of measuring a material's response to unsteady and nonlinear flow conditions, which are typical of real processing conditions. But interpreting LAOS measurements remains a challenge, and foundational assumptions—such as a linear velocity field—may not even be correct. In this talk, we will investigate the linear response function of LAOS flows for highly entangled and shear thinning polymer melts, and build connections to disparate fields including quantum mechanics and process controls. The first part of the talk will focus on developing a new experimental and mathematical analysis framework for parallel superposition rheology in LAOS, uncovering a general stability criterion for shear banding instabilities. The second part of the talk extends the discussion to two-dimensional flows, following the linear stability of Kelvin waves and their subsequent nonlinear dynamics in two-dimensional LAOS flows.

Biography

Joseph Peterson is an assistant professor in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from UCSB in 2018 under the direction of Gary Leal and Glenn Fredrickson. He was a postdoctoral scholar in DAMTP at the University of Cambridge from 2019 to 2022, working with Mike Cates. His research primarily uses theoretical/mathematical modeling tools to address fundamental challenges in rheology and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics. He is especially interested in constitutive modeling and flow instabilities for well-defined model systems with broad industrial relevance, including entangled linear polymers, dense oil/water emulsions, and dense hard particle suspensions. His research program was recognized with the NSF CAREER Award in Particulate and Multiphase Processes in 2025.

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