Prof. Keller is a biophysicist who investigates self-assembling soft condensed matter systems. Her group’s primary research focus concerns how lipid mixtures within bilayer membranes give rise to complex phase behavior, and how this behavior is manifested in biological membranes. She joined the UW faculty after earning her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and completing postdoctoral research as a Presidential Fellow at UC Santa Barbara and as an NIH NRSA Fellow at Stanford University.

Prof. Keller has been recognized for her research, mentoring, and teaching. She is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and has been honored with the Biophysical Society’s Avanti Award, the Tom Thompson Award, and the Dayhoff Award. She is a Cottrell Scholar and a STAR Awardee. She has been granted a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Her mentoring of early-career researchers has been recognized by the UW Postdoctoral Association’s Mentor Award and Honorable Mention for the UW Graduate Mentor Award. Her teaching has been recognized by a UW Distinguished Teaching Award.

The Feder lab aims to uncover how the rapid evolution of pathogens and cancers within people exacerbates disease, and how a better understanding of this intra-host evolution can be harnessed to improve human health. We are particularly interested in how the complex environment of the human body shapes this process across spatial scales. From cellular coinfection mediating viral interaction, to heterogeneous tumor microenvironments creating distinct environmental niches, and to the diverse conditions that pathogens face in different organ systems, space is a critical driver of intra-host evolution, and failure to interrogate its effects limits our ability to understand disease. While spatially-resolved data is increasingly collected at higher resolution and frequency, our analytical tools to leverage these spatial data have not kept pace. We are meeting this need by developing new quantitative approaches to understand spatially-resolved intra-host genetic data across viral, bacterial and somatic domains of life.

Agnieszka Miguel received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2001 from the University of Washington, and MSEE and BSEE from Florida Atlantic University in 1996 and 1994. Dr. Miguel’s professional interests involve image processing, machine learning, and engineering education especially active learning, diversity, retention, and recruitment. Her teaching interests include MATLAB, circuits, linear systems, and digital image processing. She is a member of the IEEE, ASEE, SWE, and Tau Beta Pi. 

Currently, Dr. Miguel is the Chair of the ASEE Professional Interest Council I, a position that gives her a seat on the ASEE Board of Directors. She is also the ASEE Pacific Northwest (PNW) Section Chair (2015 – 2017). Dr. Miguel has held several other officer positions across the ASEE including: Division Chair and Program Chair of the ECE and New Engineering Educators Divisions, and ASEE Campus Representative. Dr. Miguel is also a member-at-large of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Board of Directors. She has been a member of the ECEDHA Annual Conference Program Committee since 2013 and is serving on the Editorial Board for the ECEDHA Source monthly newsletter.