QCB Announces 2026 Postdocs

QCB is proud to announce their 2026 Postdoctoral Fellows. Armine Dingilian, Mehrdad Mohammadi, and Zane Thornburg were selected for their scholarly research and capabilities to enhance and expand the research that is the Center’s mission: developing 4D (space plus time) whole-cell models and experiments to transform our understanding of how cells function.

Armine Dingilian
Ms. Dingilian will complete her Ph.D. in biophysics and quantitative biology later this year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she works in the laboratory of QCB member Mikal Backlund. She will then begin postdoctoral research in the laboratories of QCB member Kai Zhang and QCB Director Zan Luthey-Schulten. She holds two degrees from the  University of California, Berkeley: a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in chemical engineering with a concentration applied physical science. Earlier this year, her Earlier this year,  her research  on simultaneously emitting dipole sources in optical microscopy was designated an Editor’s Pick by The Journal of Chemical Physics. In her future work, she plans to develop increasingly complex mathematical models and use optogenetics to probe cellular mechanisms and pathways, exploring how optical information can illuminate chemical phenomena and inform more sophisticated theoretical models.

Mehrdad Mohammadi
Dr. Mohammadi will be a postdoc in the labs of QCB member Shulei Wang and QCB Director Zan Luthey-Schulten. He holds a PhD in statistics from Illinois, as well as numerous degrees in mathematics, statistics, economics and finance from Illinois, Penn State, the University of Bologna, and the Petroleum University of Technology. He plans to develop a practical statistical toolkit for turning 4D whole-cell simulations into interpretable machine learning models for 4D simulations. Its core contribution is an interpretable spatiotemporal representation that enables reliable trajectory summaries and phenotype prediction, transfer from computationally cheaper well-stirred runs to limited 4D regimes, and intervention-oriented analyses that yield testable hypotheses about medium, kinetic, and network-level perturbations that prevent arrest and support successful completion of the cell cycle.

Zane Thornburg
Dr. Thornburg will be a postdoc in the labs of QCB member K. V. Prasanth and Associate Director Rohit Bhargava. He holds a PhD in physical chemistry from Illinois, where he was instrumental in helping develop the Center’s Minecraft models, and is currently a postdoc in the Cancer Center at Illinois. His work will  address major problems in transitioning simulations to complex eukaryotic cells (both normal and cancerous) by systematic advances in modeling, specifically in the areas of splicing, uptake, and metabolism by developing targeted models of fundamental processes: determining how spatial localization of reactions and their associated molecules affect the variations of alternative splicing that are known to occur in different environmental conditions, characterizing the influence of cellular crowding on uptake of biomolecules (e.g. nutrients, proteins, and even drugs) by cells in 3D multicellular systems, and quantifying the thermodynamics of metabolic reaction rates for entire metabolic networks.