"A Hard Day in the Life of a Soft Cell," Jeffrey J. Fredberg, Ph.D., Harvard bioengineering professor. With every beat of the heart, inflation of the lung, or peristalsis of the gut, cell types of diverse function are subjected to substantial stretch. But what physical laws govern the abilities of the cytoskeleton to deform, contract, and remodel? Fredberg, Ph.D. is a professor of bioengineering and physiology in the Molecular and Integrative Physiological Sciences (MIPS) program at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. According to Dr. Fredberg, new data support the idea that the cytoskeleton is at once a crowded chemical space and a fragile soft material in which the effects of biochemistry, molecular crowding, and physical forces are complex and inseparable. Dr. Fredberg observes that these conditions conspire to yield remarkably simple phenomenological laws, which appear to be universal--for a striking intersection between the worlds of cell biology and soft matter physics.