Research interests
I have completed my M.Sc. degree in Physics at IASBS (Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences) in Zanjan, Iran. My thesis focused on the effects of the adhesion between biological objects on deformation of their conformations. Since the thermal fluctuations play a crucial role in the biological systems, theoretical modeling of the mentioned systems considering the local conformational changes can shed light on this area of biological physics. In this thesis mainly I have tried to propose a dynamical model for the deformation of a membrane due to the adhesion to a substrate considering the elastic properties of the membrane and the adhesion energy.
As a PhD candidate at MPIP I will study knot formation and its dynamics in (bio)polymers.
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
- Saeed Najafi and Raffaello Potestio, Folding of small knotted proteins: Insights from a mean field coarse-grained model, J. Chem. Phys. 143, 243121 (2015)
- Saeed Najafi and Raffaello Potestio, Two Adhesive Sites Can Enhance the Knotting Probability of DNA, PLoS ONE 10(7): e0132132 (2015)
- Saeed Najafi, Rudolf Podgornik, Raffaello Potestio and Luca Tubiana, Role of Bending Energy and Knot Chirality in Knot Distribution and Their Effective Interaction along Stretched Semiflexible Polymers, Polymers 8 (10) (2016)
- Saeed Najafi, Luca Tubiana, Rudolf Podgornik and Raffaello Potestio, Chirality modifies the interaction between knots, Europhys. Lett. 114 (5) (2016)