Suliana Manley

Suliana Manley (born 1975) is an American biophysicist. Her research focuses on the development of high-resolution optical instruments, and their application in studying the organization and dynamics of proteins. She is a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and heads the Laboratory of Experimental Biophysics.

Career Manley studied physics and mathematics at Rice University where she received a Bachelor's degree (cum laude) in 1997. She then went to work as a postdoctoral researcher on lipid bilayer and red blood cell membrane dynamics with Alice P. Gast at MIT. In 2006, she joined the cell biology laboratory of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the National Institutes of Health as post-doctoral fellow. Here she developed an optical method (sptPALM) enabling the study of the dynamics of large ensembles of single proteins in membranes and inside cells.

In 2009, she became an assistant professor of physics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and to full professor in 2022. In 2020, she was elected as an APS (American Physical Society) fellow.

Research

Manley's research group is invested in the field of high-resolution optical instruments and in the investigation of complex biological systems. They develop and deploy automated super-resolution fluorescence imaging techniques combined with live cell imaging and single molecule tracking. Their aim is to determine both the dynamics and the spatial distribution of protein assembly. They are also interested in the information transduction across cell membranes and therefore investigate the assembly dynamics of membrane-bound receptor.

Their main research topics involve: High-throughput and large field-of-view single molecule localization microscopies (SMLM) by application of microlens array (MLA)-based flat-field epi-illumination. Study of the physical and physiological signatures of mitochondria division and fusion.

Publication

Patterson, George, Michael Davidson, Suliana Manley, and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz. "Superresolution imaging using single-molecule localization." Annual review of physical chemistry 61 (2010): 345-367. Doi:10.1146/annurev.physchem.012809.103444