Allison Squires holds a BSE in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. She received her PhD in biomedical engineering as an NSF and Clare Boothe Luce Fellow at Boston University, where she worked on solid-state nanopores as single-biomolecule sensors.
Prior to opening her lab at the University of Chicago, Prof. Squires completed post-doctoral training in the Chemistry Department at Stanford University, where she trapped single particles in free solution to enable detailed study of their photophysical dynamics.
Allison Squires’s research interests center on manipulating, measuring, and understanding the properties and behavior of single molecules. Advancing our capability to obtain rich biophysical data on a molecule-by-molecule basis reveals details that are obscured in bulk measurements, enabling us to build bottom-up models of complex systems. Squires Lab employs single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and single-molecule manipulation and confinement to develop sensing platforms that report on spectroscopic identity, molecular dynamics, and nanoscale energy transfer. These approaches are useful in a wide range of scientific contexts, from observation of nanoscale biomolecular interactions in cellular signaling pathways to photoadaptation in photosynthetic systems. She is also working to adapt these approaches to applied challenges in alternative energy technologies and biomedical diagnostics.
Interested in joining this lab? Please send an e-mail to Allison Squires for consideration.