Biography

Arpita Upadhyaya received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, and then worked at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT before being awarded an MIT Pappalardo Fellowship in the Department of Physics. She spent a year in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at UNC Chapel Hill before joining the UMD faculty in 2006. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008, and was promoted to associate professor in 2014. Her research uses quantitative imaging, biophysical measurements and computational analysis to study cellular mechanics and the physical forces that enable a cell to sense and respond to its physical environment, in particular cells of the immune system and cancer cells.