Attila Szabo

The main focus of my research is to bridge the gap between theory and experiment in biophysical chemistry. Early in my carrier, I developed a model-free approach to the analysis of nuclear magnetic relaxation studies of macromolecules to learn about the nature of internal motions. More recently, I have been developing the theory of both single-molecule fluorescence and force spectroscopic experiments. In the former, the problem is to describe how conformational dynamics influences the statistics of a string of photons emitted by a molecule. In the latter, where, for example, a macromolecule is pulled apart by laser tweezers, one is interested in extracting the underlying free energy surfaces from such non-equilibrium experiments and the dependence of the rate of rupture on the applied force. Recently, we found a model-free way of relating experiments performed at constant pulling velocity (where rupture force histograms are measured) and those performed at constant force (where rupture times are measured).