Contact Information
Fields of Interest
Biography
Prof. Keller is a biophysicist who investigates self-assembling soft condensed matter systems. Her group’s primary research focus concerns how lipid mixtures within bilayer membranes give rise to complex phase behavior, and how this behavior is manifested in biological membranes. She joined the UW faculty after earning her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and completing postdoctoral research as a Presidential Fellow at UC Santa Barbara and as an NIH NRSA Fellow at Stanford University.
Prof. Keller has been recognized for her research, mentoring, and teaching. She is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and has been honored with the Biophysical Society's Avanti Award, the Tom Thompson Award, and the Dayhoff Award. She is a Cottrell Scholar and a STAR Awardee. She has been granted a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Her mentoring of early-career researchers has been recognized by the UW Postdoctoral Association’s Mentor Award and Honorable Mention for the UW Graduate Mentor Award. Her teaching has been recognized by a UW Distinguished Teaching Award.
Graduate students who work with Prof. Keller have won awards nationally (e.g., NSF Graduate Research Fellowships and the Anna Louise Hoffman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Research) and internationally (e.g., Student Research Achievement Awards from the Biophysical Society and Lindau Fellowships). After graduating, they pursue a wide range of careers in industry, academia, and national labs. Prof. Keller's mentoring resources are available through the Keller Lab's website.
Awards and Honors
Research
Selected Research
- CLICK ON EACH PAPER IN THE LIST BELOW FOR A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE WORK AND ITS IMPACT. FOR MORE KELLER GROUP RESEARCH, SEE THE GROUP'S WEBSITE AT http://faculty.washington.edu/slkeller/
- Ido Levin, Naroa Sadaba, Alshakim Nelson, and Sarah L. Keller, 2024, Asymmetric flow in helical pipes inspired by shark intestines, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 121, e2406481121.
- Caitlin E. Cornell, Alexander Mileant, Niket Thakkar, Kelly K. Lee, and Sarah L. Keller, 2020, Direct Imaging of Liquid Domains in Membranes by Cryo Electron Tomography, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 117:19713-19719.
- Caitlin E. Cornell, Roy A. Black, Mengjun Xue, Helen E. Litz, Andrew Ramsay, Moshe Gordon, Alexander Mileant, Zachary R. Cohen, James A. Williams, Kelly K. Lee, Gary P. Drobny, and Sarah L. Keller, 2019, Prebiotic amino acids bind to and stabilize prebiotic fatty acid membranes, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 116:17239-17244.
- Caitlin E. Cornell, Allison D. Skinkle, Shushan He, Ilya Levental, Kandice R. Levental, and Sarah L. Keller, 2018, Tuning length scales of small domains in cell-derived membranes and synthetic model membranes, Biophys. J., 115:690-701.
- Scott P. Rayermann, Glennis E. Rayermann, Caitlin E. Cornell, Alexey J. Merz, and Sarah L. Keller, 2017, Hallmarks of reversible separation of living, unperturbed cell membranes into two liquid phases, Biophys. J., 113:2425-2432.