Maxim Belkin

e-mail: 
mbelkin@illinois.edu
phone: 
(217) 721-1774
office: 
267 LLP

Loomis Laboratory of Physics
1110 West Green Street
Urbana, IL 61801-3080

I received my B.S. in Physics from the Nizhny Novgorod State University, Russia in 2005 and Ph.D. in Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL in 2009. My thesis research was focused on far-from-equilibrium emergent behavior in ensembles of magnetic microparticles suspended at liquid-air interfaces. Together with Igor Aronson, Alexey Snezhko, and Andreas Glatz, I studied the phenomenon experimentally and theoretically. Computer simulations based on developed theoretical models successfully described self-organization and self-propulsion of observed surface structures (magnetic "snakes"). These simulations were among the first scientific modeling exercises carried out on CUDA-enabled GPUs that allowed us to achieve a 100-fold speedup compared to parallel C++ code on the fastest CPU available at the moment. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I work together with Aleksei Aksimentiev on molecular systems that incorporate novel inorganic materials and nanostructures such as graphene membranes and plasmonic nanopores. I make use of all-atom molecular dynamics (MD), atomic-resolution Brownian dynamics (ARBD), and continuum modeling (COMSOL) to understand how man-made nanoscale molecular devices function. Google Scholar Profile

Publications

  1. Maxim Belkin, and Aleksei Aksimentiev. "Molecular Dynamics Simulation of DNA Capture and Transport in Heated Nanopores." ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces 8:12599-12608 (2016). PDF icon supporting.pdf (461.04 KB)
  2. Maxim Belkin, Shu-Han Chao, Magnus P. Jonsson, Cees Dekker, and Aleksei Aksimentiev. "Plasmonic Nanopores for Trapping, Controlling Displacement, and Sequencing of DNA." ACS Nano 9:10598-10611 (2015). PDF icon nn5b04173_si_001.pdf (681.52 KB)
  3. Maxim Belkin, Shu-Han Chao, Gino Giannetti, and Aleksei Aksimentiev. "Modeling thermophoretic effects in solid-state nanopores." Journal of Computational Electronics 13:826-838 (2014).
  4. Maxim Belkin, Christopher Maffeo, David B. Wells, and Aleksei Aksimentiev. "Stretching and controlled motion of single-stranded DNA in locally heated solid-state nanopores." ACS Nano 7:6816-24 (2013). PDF icon Supporting Information (2.8 MB)
  5. David B. Wells, Maxim Belkin, Jeffrey Comer, and Aleksei Aksimentiev. "Assessing graphene nanopores for sequencing DNA." Nano Letters 12:4117-4123 (2012).