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Sarah Veatch, PhD, is a Professor of Biophysics and Physics, the Associate Director of the Biophysics unit, and director of the Biophysics Graduate Program at the University of Michigan.

Her early work described liquid-liquid phase separation in model membranes, mapping phase diagrams in purified systems and describing composition fluctuations near miscibility critical points.  She found that vesicles isolated from living cell plasma membranes  are biologically tuned to be near a membrane phase transition at growth temperatures.  Her lab is translating concepts of membrane phase separation to living cell membranes using single molecule fluorescence localization microscopy methods to quantify membrane composition at high spatial and temporal resolution and physically rigorous models to describe functional organization within signaling processes.  Overall, her research program aims to understand how diverse cellular signaling processes exploit emergent behaviors of heterogeneous plasma membranes.

Sarah received the Henry Russel Award of the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School in 2017, the Howard Prize from Durham University in 2015, the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff award from the Biophysical Society in 2014, and the a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012.  She is principle investigator on research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.