Richard M. Murray - US grants

This NSF award will be utilized to renovate approximately 5,600 square feet of research space in the Steele Laboratory of Electrical Sciences on the campus of the California Institute of Technology. Steele Lab is approximately 30 years old, and the renovation will retrofit the facility to the changed emphasis of Cal Tech electrical engineering research programs. In addition, it will consolidate researchers into one facility to work together on interdisciplinary projects in communications and automatic control. All seven project faculty have joined the faculty in the last ten years. Specific renovation activities include construction of a unique high bay area to house a flexible structure experiment as well as a distillation column of sufficient size to mimic actual industrial problems. A local area network will be established to increase researcher interaction and to overcome the inefficiencies associated with use of the campus backbone system which is approaching maximum capacity. The project will have an important impact on faculty growth and student enrollment, including minorities and women, in the competitive area of communications and automatic control.

9502224 Murray This CAREER award emphasizes the use of two-degree-of- freedom design techniques for generating nonlinear controllers for mechanical systems performing motion control tasks. Typical applications include high performance control of piloted aircrafts using vectored thrust propulsion, navigation and control of unmanned flight vehicles performing surveillance and other tasks, motion control and stabilization of underwater vehicles , and control of land based robotic locomotion systems. The nonlinear controller synthesis problem is initially separated into the design of a feasible trajectory for the nominal model of the system, followed by regulation around that trajectory using controllers that have guaranteed performance in presence of uncertainties. New methods are devised for quickly generating suboptimal trajectories that accomplish a desired control objective. Educational activities include development of innovative curriculum in control and dynamical systems, setting up experimental laboratories for graduate and undergraduate teaching, and involving undergraduate students in independent research-oriented projects.***

0090616
Murray

This award is to California Institute of Technology to support the activity described below for 30 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF 0082).

Partners
Partners for the partnership include California Institute of Technology; Art Center College of Design; State government through Business Technology Center incubator; private industry.

Proposed Activities
The activities for this award include creation of post-degree entrepreneurial fellowships with the goal of preparing students previously trained in science or design to adapt their skills to the development of commercial products in the start-up environment; training in entreperneurialship (business plan, develop engineering prototypes; financial sources, etc); industrial partner mentor program.

Proposed Innovation
The innovation goals for the award include education of entrepreneurial leaders who have primary graduate and post-graduate education in science and engineering; formation of start-up high tech companies; development of educational modules for entrepreneurial courses for export to other universities.

Potential Economic Impact
The potential economic outcomes include teaching modules for export to other schools; spin-off companies; network of entrepreneurs and industry partners; graduates in science and technology with entrepreneurial training for leadership roles in the private sector.

Potential Societal Impact
The major benefit to society from this award will be the creation of high tech jobs and an education methodology for training future leaders in an innovative society.

We propose to develop a framework for designing incentives for electric power networks and their associated markets that provides robust power generation while rewarding efficiency and environmental friendliness. The key technical thrusts are:

1. Development of prototype economic mechanisms for buying and selling
power addressing non-steady state performance and incorporating
engineering considerations such as production efficiency and
environmental emissions.

2. Analysis and synthesis of information fusion and feedback control
mechanisms at the component, network, and market levels providing high
performance and robust operation in the presence of uncertainty and
faults.

3. Implementation of economics experiments to test engineering performance
and market volatility of representative power networks, using 20-30
human subjects and software agents interacting with a distributed
simulation of a large scale power system.

We will combine methods from control, computation and economics in a unified framework for market-based systems that is expected to be applicable to other critical infrastructure problems involving interconnected economic, information, and engineering systems.

We will also develop elements of a curriculum that will provide training to students in economics, computer science, and engineering. These curriculum activities will be integrated into a novel set of interdisciplinary courses that are being developed for the newly formed Social and Information Systems Laboratory at Caltech. These courses will provide necessary training for economic and information scientists who are needed to analyze, design, implement and operate large scale social and information systems. Participation of women and underrepresented minorities will be specifically targeted and pursued through the summer undergraduate research programs.

This project is developing a new framework for investigating the dynamics of
information in complex, interconnected systems. The key technical thrusts
of the project are: (1) real-time information theory, (2) robust control of
networks, (3) packet-based control theory,and (4) computational complexity
of network systems. Each of these thrusts explores aspects of information
systems that must interact with the real-world in a manner that requires
careful control of the timing of the computation and the evolution of the
information state of the system. While diverse in application, these
thrusts represent a common core of intellectual thrusts that integrate
computer science, control, and communications.

The results of the proposed research are being evaluated on two testbeds
already at Caltech. The first is the Multi-Vehicle Wireless Testbed, which
provides a distributed environment for control of 8-10 vehicles performing
cooperative tasks in a real-time environment. The second is the WAN in Lab,
a wide area network consisting of high speed servers, programmable routers,
electronic crossconnects, and long haul fibers with associated optical
amplifiers, dispersion compensation modules and optical multiplexers.

The project is also developing elements of a curriculum that will provide
training to students in information systems that blends communications,
computation, and control. This includes integration our the research
framework into a recently created course at Caltech on the principles of
feedback and control, CDS 101, as well as development a second course, IST
201, aimed at bringing together faculty and students interested in working
on problems at the boundaries of these traditional disciplines.

We propose to organize a workshop at the upcoming Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) to bring together academic, industry, and government researchers to explore cross-disciplinary research and interaction with industry. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss successful mechanisms for integrating academic research in control with industry applications and, in particular, cross-disciplinary teams. The workshop will involve 8-10 invited speakers and will be open to all participants of the CDC.

Abstract
0428075
Joel Burdick
Caltech

This project will develop basic theory, algorithms, and experimental demonstrations of networks of autonomous mobile sensory platforms. Mobile sensor units enable a sensor network to transiently focus on events or locations that might be interesting or important while at the same time maintaining awareness of the overall environment. Particular focus on tasks where mobile sensory-motor platforms operate in human environments and interact with human operators. The consideration for theory and algorithms include: (1) use mobility to improve network performance; (2) facilitate the interaction between sensor networks and humans; and (3) improve the ability of networks to detect learned categories or events. New unsupervised learning methods will form the basis for object and event detection. We will demonstrate our methods on the Caltech Multi-Vehicle Wireless Testbed (MVWT), an experimental testbed at Caltech consisting of fan-driven and wheeled vehicles operating in a common environment endowed with a variety of sensors and communication schemes.

This is a project supported under the Sensors Initiative NSF 04-522.

There is great potential for adapting biopolymer molecules such as RNA and DNA to meaningful computational tasks and purposes. Having the ability to program molecules at many orders of magnitude larger scale than at present using new algorithms and software analogues has the potential to change the way we analyze, understand and manipulate molecular systems. It can lead to practical applications of significant benefit to society across a wide range of national initiatives in materials, nano-biotechnology, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and many other emerging areas. This ambitious Expedition addresses the exciting challenge of developing initial foundational steps toward creating large-scale molecular programs. This experimental technology Expedition aims to develop a functional abstraction hierarchy to create molecular programming languages, compilers, tools and models; a theoretical framework for the analysis and design of molecular programs; validation of the above utilizing molecular programs with orders of magnitude higher scale of components than at present; and testing of the developed molecular programming technologies on real-world applications. This high-risk/high-payoff research will increase our understanding of the relationship between computation and the physical world, how information can be stored and processed by molecules, and the possibilities and limits of what can be computed and fabricated. Outreach includes summer undergraduate and minority student research fellowships, K-12 visiting days, boot camps, workshops and many other efforts to create a broader molecular programming research community.

CPS:Small:Control Design for CyberPhysical Systems Using Slow Computing

The objective of this research is to develop principles and tools for the
design of control systems using highly distributed, but slow, computational
elements. The approach of this research is to build an architecture that
uses highly parallelized, simple computational elements incorporating
nonlinearities, time delay and asynchronous computation as integral design
elements. Tools for the design of non-deterministic protocols will be
developed and demonstrated using an existing multi-vehicle testbed at
Caltech.

The motivation for using "slow computing" is to develop new feedback control
architectures for applications where computational power is extremely
limited. Examples of such systems are those where the energy usage of the
system must remain small, either due to the source of power available
(e.g. batteries or solar cells) or the physical size of the device
(e.g. microscale and nanoscale robots). A longer term application area is
in the design of control systems using novel computing substrates, such as
biological circuits. A critical element in both cases is the tight coupling
between the dynamics of the underlying process and the temporal properties
of the algorithm that is controlling it.

The implementation plan for this project involves students from multiple
disciplines (including bioengineering, computer science, electrical
engineering and mechanical engineering) as well as at multiple experience
levels (sophomores through PhD students) working together on a set of
interlinked research problems. The project is centered in the Control and
Dynamical Systems department at Caltech, which has a strong record of
recruiting women and underrepresented minority students into its programs.

This project is developing a theoretical foundation for the design of network architecture, which is essential to understanding highly evolved, organized, and complex networks, inspired by and with application to technological, biological, ecological, and social networks, and with strong connections to real-world data. Architecture involves the most universal, high-level, and persistent elements of organization, usually defined in terms of protocols ? the rules that facilitate interaction between the diverse components of a network. Network technology promises to provide unprecedented levels of performance, efficiency, sustainability, and robustness in almost all technological, natural, and social systems. The ?robust yet fragile? (RYF) feature of complex systems is ubiquitous, and a theoretical framework to manage the complexity/fragility spirals of our future infrastructures is critical.

The intellectual merit of this project is both theoretical and practical. A theory of architecture is crucial for the design of future networks and is at the heart of sustainability. Comparison of architectures from biology, ecology, and technology has identified a variety of common characteristic organizational structures. These observations will form the basis for a mathematical theory of architecture.

The broader impact of this project is through the application of network architecture design to multiple areas of engineering and through the development of a unified approach to teaching systems and complexity. The project involves a diverse collection of researchers, including women and underrepresented minorities. Research results are disseminated not only through domain-specific journals, but also in the broad-interest high-impact literature (e.g. Science, Nature, PNAS).

One of the main challenges to designing robots that can operate around humans is to create systems that can guarantee safety and effectiveness, while being robust to the nuisances of unstructured environments, from hardware faults to software issues, erroneous calibration, and less predictable anomalies, such as tampering and sabotage. However, the fact that the streams of observations and commands possess coherence properties suggests that many of these disturbances could be detected and automatically mitigated with general methods that imply very low design efforts. Currently, robotic systems are developed as a set of components realizing a directed "computation graph". This project focuses on theoretical methods, applicable designs, and reference implementation of a faults/anomalies detection mechanism for low-level robotic sensorimotor signals. The system, without any prior information about the robot configuration, should learn a model of the robot and the environment by passive observations of the signals exposed in the computation graph, and, based on this model, instantiate faults/anomalies detection components in an augmented computation graph.

The project engages undergraduate and graduate students in advanced robotics design and development. It is expected the research results will have a significant impact on future robotic systems and machine learning.

The computing revolution began over two thousand years ago with the advent of mechanical devices for calculating the motions of celestial bodies. Sophisticated clockwork automata were developed centuries later to control the machinery that drove the industrial revolution, culminating in Babbage's remarkable design for a programmable mechanical computer. With the electronic revolution of the last century, the speed and complexity of computers increased dramatically. Using embedded computers we now program the behavior of a vast array of electro-mechanical devices, from cell phones and satellites to industrial manufacturing robots and self-driving cars. The history of computing has taught researchers two things: first, that the principles of computing can be embodied in a wide variety of physical substrates from gears to transistors, and second, that the mastery of a new physical substrate for computing has the potential to transform technology. Another revolution is just beginning, one whose inspiration is the incredible chemistry and molecular machinery of life, one whose physical computing substrate consists of synthetic biomolecules and designed chemical reactions. Like the previous revolutions, this "molecular programming revolution" will have the principles of computer science at its core. By systematically programming the behaviors of a wide array of complex information-based molecular systems, from decision-making circuitry and molecular-scale manufacturing to biomedical diagnosis and smart therapeutics, it has the potential to radically transform material, chemical, biological, and medical industries. With molecular programming, chemistry will become a major new information technology of the 21st century.

This Expeditions-in-Computing project aims to establish solid foundations for molecular programming. Building on advances in DNA nanotechnology, DNA computing, and synthetic biology, the project will develop methods for programmable self-assembly of DNA strands to create sophisticated 2D and 3D structures, dynamic biochemical circuitry based on programmable interactions between DNA, RNA, and proteins, and integrated behaviors within spatially organized molecular systems and living cells. These architectures will provide systematic building blocks for creating programmable molecular systems able to sense molecular input, compute decisions about those inputs, and act on their environment. To manage system complexity and to provide modularity, the project will establish abstraction hierarchies with associated high-level languages for programming structure and behavior, compilers that turn high-level code into lists of synthesizable DNA sequences, and analysis software that can predict the performance of the sequences. This will allow molecular programmers to specify, design, and verify the correctness of their systems before they are ever synthesized in the laboratory. In addition to these software tools, the project will study the theory of molecular algorithms in order to understand the potential and limitations of information-based molecular systems, what makes them efficient at the tasks they can perform, and how they can be effectively designed and analyzed. Putting the products of this fundamental research to the test, the project will pursue real-world applications such as molecular instruments for probing biological systems and programmable fabrication of nanoscale devices.

This project will expand the network of scientists and engineers working in molecular programming by building a diverse community of students, teachers, researchers, scientists, and engineers. This community will be fostered through the creation of publicly accessible software tools, courses, textbooks, workshops, tutorials, undergraduate research competitions, and popular science videos to teach the principles and methods of molecular programming and to engage young researchers and the public in this exciting new field. Industrial partnerships with relevant biotechnology and other high-tech companies will ensure fast transfer of knowledge generated into real-world products. Perhaps most importantly, as molecular programming becomes a widespread technology, it has the potential to transform industry with new complex nanostructured materials, to transform chemistry with integrated and autonomous control of reactions, to transform biology with advanced molecular instruments, and to transform health care with more sophisticated diagnostics and therapeutics.

Workshop on Future Directions in Control, Dynamics and Systems

The proposal is to bring together leading US and international researchers to discuss latest advances in control and feedback, dynamics, and geometry, systems, networks and applications. The workshop sessions will focus on established connections between topics in Control and Dynamical Systems (CDS) program at Caltech and emerging opportunities. This workshop is unique as it will bring in distinguished US and international researchers to participate and discuss future directions for the control and dynamical systems community. The goal is recognize some of the successes of the field in the past 20 years and to talk about new opportunities in the next 20 years. A particular focus of the workshop will be on how the future directions of CDS can better serve the nation, and how to educate a new breed of scientists and engineers in this important area. Sample application areas include aerospace and transportation, biology and medicine, communications and networking, economics and finance, energy and infrastructure, materials and processing, and robotics and intelligent machines. The workshop will be held on August 5-7, 2014 in Pasadena, CA.

The workshop will include three major themes (1) control and feedback (2) dynamics and geometry (3) systems, networks and applications. The workshop will have a strong educational component for graduate and undergraduate students, especially those seeking to define an exciting thesis topic for a 21st century control theory that continues to impact society and technology in numerous ways. The outcome of the workshop will be published in the IEEE Control Systems Magazine for wider dissemination. It is expected that this workshop will have a significant impact in setting the direction of research and innovations in control system engineering.

This NSF Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontier project "Verified Human Interfaces, Control, and Learning for Semi-Autonomous Systems (VeHICaL)" is developing the foundations of verified co-design of interfaces and control for human cyber-physical systems (h-CPS) --- cyber-physical systems that operate in concert with human operators. VeHICaL aims to bring a formal approach to designing both interfaces and control for h-CPS, with provable guarantees.

The VeHICaL project is grounded in a novel problem formulation that elucidates the unique requirements on h-CPS including not only traditional correctness properties on autonomous controllers but also quantitative requirements on the logic governing switching or sharing of control between human operator and autonomous controller, the user interface, privacy properties, etc. The project is making contributions along four thrusts: (1) formalisms for modeling h-CPS; (2) computational techniques for learning, verification, and control of h-CPS; (3) design and validation of sensor and human-machine interfaces, and (4) empirical evaluation in the domain of semi-autonomous vehicles. The VeHICaL approach is bringing a conceptual shift of focus away from separately addressing the design of control systems and human-machine interaction and towards the joint co-design of human interfaces and control using common modeling formalisms and requirements on the entire system. This co-design approach is making novel intellectual contributions to the areas of formal methods, control theory, sensing and perception, cognitive science, and human-machine interfaces.

Cyber-physical systems deployed in societal-scale applications almost always interact with humans. The foundational work being pursued in the VeHICaL project is being validated in two application domains: semi-autonomous ground vehicles that interact with human drivers, and semi-autonomous aerial vehicles (drones) that interact with human operators. A principled approach to h-CPS design --- one that obtains provable guarantees on system behavior with humans in the loop --- can have an enormous positive impact on the emerging national ``smart'' infrastructure. In addition, this project is pursuing a substantial educational and outreach program including: (i) integrating research into undergraduate and graduate coursework, especially capstone projects; (ii) extensive online course content leveraging existing work by the PIs; (iii) a strong undergraduate research program, and (iv) outreach and summer programs for school children with a focus on reaching under-represented groups.

Core 2: Data Science Resource Core Abstract The Data Science Resource Core (DSRC) will create a Data Science Plan and associated workflow to support the research efforts within our team project. Dr. Richard Murray will serve lead PI of the DSRC with assistance from the Administrative Core. We will create a Data Science Plan to fit the experimental and computational needs of the proposed research, and facilitate the standardization off data across projects, member laboratories, and the scientific community at large. The protocols, data, algorithms, and workflows proposed in the DSRC will follow the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. The outcome of the Data Science Plan includes development of a prototype data science framework, which will enable aggregation and analysis of our experimental protocols and the heterogeneous data generated in each project, as well as plans for short and long term storage and dissemination of data. To ensure consistent data quality standards across projects and laboratories, we will create a collaborative repository for experimental protocols and best practices. For exchanging data, software, models, protocols and ideas within our member laboratories, we will establish an efficient and easy-to-use infrastructure. We will develop new methods for collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing the data sets generated by the individual products, with a focus on the use of model-based tools. We will also establish an efficient and easy-to-use infrastructure for exchanging data, CAD files for instrumentation, and analysis software with the external scientific community.

A Brain Circuit Program for Understanding the Sensorimotor Basis of Behavior Abstract The Project team's long-term goal is to develop a comprehensive theory of animal behavior that explicitly incorporates neural processes operating across hierarchical levels ? from circuits that regulate the action of individual muscles to those that regulate behavioral sequences and decisions. Our innovative approach is guided by the notion that different brain regions are not linked within a single neuroanatomical tier, but rather constitute a series of hierarchically nested feedback loops. The effort is organized into four Research Projects, each focusing on a different processing stage related to: (1) muscle action, (2) motor patterns, (3) motion guidance, and (4) behavioral sequences. Demonstrating our commitment to team interaction, these Research Projects are not organized according to PIs laboratories, but rather each constitutes a collaborative multi- laboratory effort. The collective expertise of our research team spans the entire nervous system - from the sensory periphery to the motor periphery and was chosen to include experts in every experimental technique we require (molecular genetics, electrophysiology, optical imaging, biomechanics, quantitative behavioral analysis, control theory, and dynamic network theory). We will exploit mathematical approaches ? control theory and dynamic network theory in particular ? that are best suited to model feedback and the flow of information through and among different processing stages in the brain. The four complimentary and integrated Research Projects will focus on ethologically relevant natural behaviors, with an emphasis on recording methods that interrogate the functions of genetically identified neurons in intact, behaving animals ? a rigorous standard that is designed to have the broadest impact on systems neuroscience. Our research exploits a single, experimentally tractable model system (Drosophila melanogaster), in which we can easily study the functions of genetically identified cell classes in ethologically relevant behaviors. Our experiments emphasize methods that interrogate the functions of neurons in intact, behaving animals, a rigorous standard that is designed to have the broadest impact on systems neuroscience. Our research will be supported by an Instrumentation and Software Resource Core that will develop and support novel devices and software, so that we can continue to employ state-of-the-art experimental techniques and data analysis. Collectively, our research program constitutes a systematic attack on the neural basis of behavior that integrates vertically across phenomenological tiers. The result of our effort will be a new synthesis of how a fully embodied brain works to generate behavior.  

The goal of this project is to advance the state of the art in autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by integrating tools from computer science and control theory. With the rise in deployment of autonomous CPS--from automotive to aerospace to robotic systems--there is a pressing need to verify and validate properties of these systems and thereby ensure their safe operation. The work will help establish the scientific basis for test and evaluation methods applicable to CPS, especially as they interact with other agents and the world in highly dynamic ways. This has the potential to inform the development and deployment of complex CPS in a variety of application domains: from (semi-) autonomous cars, to safety features in aviation, to robotic systems for industrial applications and space exploration. The appeal of dynamic CPS will be utilized to broaden participation in computing and engineering.

The vision of this project is to establish the scientific foundations for the verification and validation of highly dynamic safety-critical CPS operating in complex environments. The key novelty is a rigorous approach that leverages control barrier functions on the underlying nonlinear dynamics to provide guarantees of set invariance yielding: safety-critical abstractions on which to specify and verify desired properties, formal methods certifying system-level designs against those properties, and design rules that allow adaptation and machine learning to be integrated with control barrier functions thereby preserving system safety and performance specifications. Proof-of-concept experimental demonstrations will be performed on CPS that are autonomous, dynamic and safety-critical, e.g., robotic systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This research was funded in response to the NSF Engineering - UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Opportunity NSF 18-067.

The capability exists to design and implement functioning circuits and reaction pathways inside cells. This project makes use of cell-free systems to overcome some of the difficulties associated with these activities in living cells. The necessity to test performance inside cells limits the possible pathways to those that are not toxic to the host cell. Unfortunately, the performance of cell-free systems has proven to be erratic, exhibiting poor reliability. This project will establish a reliable, reproducible, cell-free platform. The design-build-test cycle could be shortened dramatically if it could be accomplished in a cell-free environment. This would have a beneficial impact on scientific research, engineered devices, and STEM education. As a collaboration with Imperial College London, this project will also promote research exchanges, providing US students with international research experiences.

The primary goal of this project is to standardize cell-free systems from engineered E. coli and other organisms. Such systems will be used to explore the boundaries of cell-free prototyping and enable more detailed understanding of key mechanisms. This could accelerate the usage and broader utility of cell-free systems in industry and academia. The long term vision is to establish cell-free systems as a platform for implementation of synthetic biological circuits, pathways, and systems, where modular and complex biomolecular systems can be engineered in a systematic fashion. This project seeks to overcome some of the current limitations of cell-free systems through a combination of experimental characterization and computational modeling. If successful, this project will expand the utility of cell-free systems to a broader class of circuits and pathways. The specific objectives of the project are (1) the development of well-understood cell-free reaction systems suitable for prototyping circuits and pathways for a variety of cells; (2) characterization and modeling of complex synthetic biology components and core mechanisms using cell-free extracts; and (3) development of new biochemical indicator modules for monitoring and characterizing circuit performance.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This is a project that focuses on the development of functioning molecular motors for micron-scale synthetic cells, demonstrating mechanisms for motility in (synthetic) cellular systems. Recent advances in the fields of synthetic biology and molecular sciences have substantially advanced the ability to produce genetically-programmed synthetic cells and multicellular machines from molecular components. These efforts provide techniques for the bottom-up construction of cell-like systems that can provide scientists with new insights into how natural cells work, harness the power of biology to create nanoscale, biomolecular machines, and provide an exciting pathway for exploration of the Rules of Life. This project considers the ?actuation? subsystem of a synthetic cell, with the goal of allowing expression of membrane-integrated actuation complexes that can serve as a starting point to modulate the motility of the cell. The project engages undergraduate students from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program at California Institute of Technology and establishes collaborations between the US Build-A-Cell consortium and Imperial College, London, that includes personnel exchanges to build stronger international ties.

To demonstrate the ability to express actuation complexes capable of modulating motility, this project (i) creates and optimizes vesicles with reconstituted transmembrane complexes (proto-flagella) that can eventually drive motility and (ii) engineers new vesicle systems that rely on TX-TL for the synthesis of the soluble and membrane proteins needed for motility. The project team redefines the state of the art by driving a step change in the type and complexity of behavioral modules that can be introduced into synthetic cells. Reconstituting membrane proteins provides new insights into the biological processes that underlie mechanisms for motility in microorganisms. In conjunction, the project develops generic methodologies for achieving in vesicle genetic control of membrane proteins, using proto-flagella as a test case.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.