Daniel Axelrod

Professor of Physics and Research Scientist in Biophysics, University of Michigan, 930 North University, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USAe-mail: daxelrod@umich.edu

Daniel Axelrod earned a dual Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, USA, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked on rare-earth luminescence microscopy in living nerve cells. He was subsequently a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University (in the group of Watt W. Webb) where he participated in the introduction of laser-spot fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) and its application to studying membrane dynamics of cultured cells. Axelrod then accepted a faculty position in the Department of Physics and the Biophysics Research Division at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with which he has been associated ever since. At Michigan, he introduced and developed total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, as well as numerous other novel microscopy techniques useful in cell biology. Aside from biophysical optical technique development, his present research efforts are in collaboration with biologists who study exocytotic dynamics in secretory cells. He also has scientific interests in the physics of music, meteorology, the mathematics of reaction/diffusion kinetics, and self-organization in complex systems. He was elected a Fellow of the Biophysical Society in the inaugural year of the Fellows programme.