Aeron Tynes Hammack to Deliver Lecture as Part of the Class of 1963 Scholars in Residence Program Hammack’s talk will be held March 26 in Science Addition 214.

By Brian Laubscher
March 24, 2026

Aeron Tynes Hammack, staff scientist and director of the nanofabrication facility for the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 26 in the Science Addition, Room 214.

Hammack’s talk, titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, but how do we Read the Threads of Life at the Atomic Scale,” is free and open to the public. Pizza will be provided.

Hammack is visiting Washington and Lee University as part of the Class of 1963 Scholars in Residence Program, supported by the Provost’s Office, the College and the Women of Math, Science and Engineering faculty cohort (WIMSE). In addition to his lecture, Hammack will also have lunch with the WIMSE faculty members and discuss the cutting-edge research at the Molecular Foundry.

“Dr. Hammack brings to campus a rare perspective at the intersection of nanoscience and biophysics,” said Mengying Liu, assistant professor of engineering. “His visit creates a direct bridge between our campus and a national laboratory, connecting faculty and students to advanced instrumentation, technical expertise and collaborative opportunities that are otherwise difficult to access.”

Hammack’s talk will focus on research that explores how we can build tiny devices capable of studying the smallest building blocks of life, down to individual cells, molecules and biological particles. Most tools in biology are designed to measure large groups of cells at once, which can obscure the differences at the single-entity level. By developing nanoscale fluidic systems and sensing devices, Hammack and his colleagues aim to observe and measure biological systems one particle at a time. This work builds on advances in miniaturized technology that have already transformed medicine, most notably in DNA sequencing, where shrinking measurement tools have led to an explosion of genetic data. The goal is to create a new generation of technologies that can capture highly detailed biological information at the smallest scales, opening the door to breakthroughs in how we understand living systems and how we detect and study disease.

Hammack is a quantum information and condensed matter physicist by training and has been leading research to develop wild-type and engineered bacteriophages into antibiotic agents approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the past decade. After earning a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the University of California, San Diego, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Molecular Foundry Imaging Facility. He then joined Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (now Western Digital) as a researcher studying nanofabricated plasmonic devices for information storage on the Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) project before co-founding EpiBiome, a precision microbiome company focused on developing genetically modified phage-based therapeutics to combat antibiotic resistance.