Lena Blackmon is a biophysics PhD student in Dan Fletcher’s lab at UC Berkeley. Lena’s research focuses on developing microscopy methods to quantify molecular flexibility and crowding on cell surfaces. Prior to their tenure at Berkeley, Lena was an R&D engineer in Computational Microscopy at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub SF and developed optical systems for the serosurveillance of Dengue virus in Cambodia. Lena holds a B.S in Materials Science and Engineering and an M.S. in Applied Physics from Stanford University. As an Irving H. Wiesenfeld fellow, Lena will apply methods of fluorescence polarization microscopy to understand Plasmodium-infected cell surfaces, aiding the development of next-generation therapeutics that target molecular flexibility to reduce the global malaria disease burden.