Wenhui Tang

Wenhui is a PhD student in mechanical engineering whose research focuses on the spatial and temporal self-organization of multicellular living systems in 3D during physiological and pathological processes. She uses modern microscopy to image in real time the 4D spontaneous organization of living cells and under various conditions, including different surrounding matrix mechanics and substrate curvature. Using MATLAB, she can extract data from microscopic videos and images and convert the optical intensity information into cell positions as a function of time. She also calculates the multicellular flow field such as swell/shrink, rotation and shear to understand how multicellular system dynamics changes as substrate curvature changes. Based on cell positions in 3D, she uses MATLAB code to perform Voronoi tessellation of cells on a spherical surface that can be used to reveal the cell packing behavior during human lung alveolar development. Wenhui earned a BEng from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China and an SM from MIT.