• Gordon A. Cain University Professor
• A.B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics
• Director, Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education
• Professor of Biomedical Engineering
• Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics
• Professor of Physics

John Wikswo and his group are at present working in three areas: the study of the linear and non-linear electrical properties of cardiac tissue during stimulation, propagation, and recovery for threshold- and defibrillation-strength shocks; the electrical behavior of intestinal smooth muscle, as can be observed using SQUID magnetometry; and the development and application of micro- and nano-scale devices for instrumenting and controlling the single biological cell and small populations of interconnected cells.

Through each of these projects, he is supporting and mentoring multiple trainees from the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, and Physics & Astronomy. Collaborators of  Professor Wikswo in Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Molecular Physiology and Biophysics are supporting and mentoring additional students through shared research grants and projects.

The questions being asked and hypotheses being addressed by these trainees range from the molecular scale to that of whole tissue. For example, a long-term program to understand the effects of defibrillation-strength shocks on cardiac tissue now includes studies of electroporation and molecular diffusion, the role of gap junctions, and the effects of strong field pulses on the inactivation kinetics of sodium channels. The molecular-level studies are proving critical to understand the response of whole tissue to defibrillation. The studies of the electrical behavior of intestinal smooth muscle, initially conducted on humans and animals, are now considering the molecular mechanisms that drive and couple the electrical and mechanical oscillations, and include the non-linear dynamics of distributed oscillatory systems. Both of these projects make use of Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) magnetometers and microscopes developed by John Wikswo's and Franz Baudenbacher's groups.   The project to instrument and control single cells is addressing issues as varied as the use of cells to identify and discriminate chemical and biological warfare agents by metabolic and signaling phenotype; the development and application of BioMEMS (BioMicroElectroMechanical Systems) devices to understand the molecular signaling associated with chemotaxis, cellular motility, angiogenesis, and metastasis; and the nature of the signaling and metabolic activity associated with the immune response.