RESEARCH INTERESTS

Biophysics

BIOGRAPHY
B.S., Physics (1981)
Indian Institute of Technology
M.S., Physics (1982)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D., Physics(1988)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Professor Ansari's research is in experimental Biophysics. She has worked extensively on characterizing the conformational dynamics of proteins and the kinetics of relaxation from a non-equilibrium ensemble of conformations. Current efforts in her laboratory are directed toward understanding the principles behind secondary structure formation in single-stranded DNA, RNA and proteins, with the application of theoretical and computational models from statistical mechanics of polymers to better understand the experiments. She uses time-resolved absorbance and fluorescence measurements following a 10 nanosecond laser temperature-jump to probe the dynamics of the biological macromolecules. Professor Ansari received the National Science Foundation CAREER award for her research in 1998.

PUBLICATIONS

• A. Ansari, Y. Shen, and S. Kuznetsov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 069801 (2002).
• Y. Shen, S. V. Kuznetsov, and A. Ansari, "Loop dependence of the dynamics of DNA hairpins," J. Phys. Chem. B. 105, 12202-12211 (2001).
• S. Kuznetsov, O. M. Sidorkina, Y. Shen, J. Laval, and A. Ansari, "Characterization of thermal stability of a DNA repair enzyme, the Escherichia coli formamidopyrimidine-DNA glycosylase," Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm, 288, 121-128 (2001).
• S. Kuznetsov, Y. Shen, A. S. Benight, and A. Ansari, "A semi-flexible polymer chain model applied to loop formation in DNA hairpins," Biophys. J. 81, 2864-2875 (2001).
• A. Ansari, S. Kuznetsov, and Y. Shen, "Configurational diffusion down a folding funnel describes the dynamics of DNA hairpins," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98, 7771-7771 (2001).