Dr William (Mack) Durham
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
Senior Lecturer in Biological Physics
+44 114 222 4537
Full contact details
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
D30
Hicks Building
Hounsfield Road
Sheffield
S3 7RH
- Profile
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My research aims to understand the strategies that microorganisms use to exploit their natural environment and compete with one another.
Most of my work is focussed in three different areas:
- surface-attached bacterial communities called biofilms, which are responsible for many hard to treat infections,
- unicellular phytoplankton, which are tiny plants that live in the ocean and cumulatively produce half of the oxygen we breathe
- bacteria living within porous environments like soil, where they drive global carbon cycles and facilitate many important processes in agriculture.
My research group does both experiments and theoretical work. We use a diverse set of approaches including microfluidics, molecular biology, mathematical models, massively parallel cell tracking, high performance computing, and evolutionary game theory.
Currently, my group is composed of two postdocs (Dr Jamie Wheeler and Dr Oliver Meacock) and four PhD students (Mina Mohaghegh, Nathan Costin, Alexander Bruce and Sasha Evans).
Career history
- Departmental Research Lecturer (2012-2016, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, fixed-term position)
- Lecturer of Biological Physics (2016 - present, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield, permanent position).
- Qualifications
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- BSc in Civil Engineering (2000-2004, Clemson University, USA)
- SM in Civil and Environmental Engineering (2004-2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
- PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering (2006-2012, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
- Research interests
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How do bacteria navigate surfaces using pili-based motility?
Bacteria use tiny "grappling hooks" called pili to pull themselves across solid surfaces. We discovered that surface attached bacteria can sense chemical gradients and use this information to navigate to where nutrients are more abundant (Oliveira, Foster, Durham, PNAS, 2016).
I recently received a BBSRC New Investigator grant to resolve the molecular and physical systems that underlie this remarkable ability.
How do bacteria compete in porous soil environments?
Bacteria living in porous environments (like soil and sediments) constitute approximately half of the carbon within living organisms globally.
While these bacteria play a key role in agriculture, biogeochemical cycling, pollutant transport, oil extraction, and hydrology, we understand very little how bacteria compete with one another in these heterogenous environments.
My group uses a combination of microfluidic experiments, genetics, mechanistic models, and game theory to understand how bacterial competition plays out in porous environments.
In a recent paper we showed porous environments can actually select for bacteria that grow more slowly, challenging a long-held paradigm in microbiology (Coyte Tabuteau, Gaffney, Foster, Durham, PNAS, 2017).
How does flow affect phytoplankton ecology in marine systems?
Unicellular plants called phytoplankton compose the base the marine food web and cumulatively produce half of the oxygen that we breathe.
Our work has revealed has ambient flow in the ocean can drive striking accumulations of phytoplankton, which in turn can profoundly both phytoplankton ecology and the fisheries which they sustain.
We use a combination of laboratory models, simple theoretical models, and supercomputer-based numerical simulations to resolve how fluid flow interacts with phytoplankton motility across a range of different length scales.
Recently, we showed that chain formation can profoundly enhance phytoplankton's ability to swim through the small-scale turbulence that is ubiquitous in marine environments (Lovecchio, Climent, Stocker, Durham, Science Advances, 2019).
How do bacteria coordinate their motility within densely packed biofilms?
Many bacterial infections are caused by densely packed collections of bacteria called biofilms, which spread along surfaces using pili-based motility. In biofilms, rod shape bacteria tend to align their motility with one another, which gives rise to highly coordinated collective behaviour.
My group aims to unravel the physical and molecular systems that bacteria use to efficiently move within these biofilm communities.
- Publications
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Show: Featured publications All publications
Featured publications
Journal articles
- Bacteria solve the problem of crowding by moving slowly. Nature Physics. View this article in WRRO
- Chain formation can enhance the vertical migration of phytoplankton through turbulence. Science Advances, 5(10). View this article in WRRO
- A model of strongly biased chemotaxis reveals the trade-offs of different bacterial migration strategies. Mathematical Medicine and Biology A Journal of the IMA. View this article in WRRO
- Microfluidics with fluid walls. Nature Communications, 8(1). View this article in WRRO
- Microbial competition in porous environments can select against rapid biofilm growth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(2), E161-E170. View this article in WRRO
- Single-cell twitching chemotaxis in developing biofilms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(23), 6532-6537. View this article in WRRO
- Turbulence drives microscale patches of motile phytoplankton. Nature Communications, 4(1).
- Thin Phytoplankton Layers: Characteristics, Mechanisms, and Consequences. Annual Review of Marine Science, 4(1), 177-207.
- Disruption of Vertical Motility by Shear Triggers Formation of Thin Phytoplankton Layers. Science, 323(5917), 1067-1070.
All publications
Journal articles
- Two codependent routes lead to high-level MRSA. Science, 386(6721), 573-580.
- Identification of pathways to high-level vancomycin resistance in Clostridioides difficile that incur high fitness costs in key pathogenicity traits. PLOS Biology, 22(8). View this article in WRRO
- Tracking bacteria at high density with FAST, the Feature-Assisted Segmenter/Tracker. PLOS Computational Biology, 19(10). View this article in WRRO
- Steering self-organisation through confinement. Soft Matter.
- Reconfigurable Microfluidic Circuits for Isolating and Retrieving Cells of Interest. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 14(22), 25209-25219.
- Bacteria solve the problem of crowding by moving slowly. Nature Physics. View this article in WRRO
- Chain formation can enhance the vertical migration of phytoplankton through turbulence. Science Advances, 5(10). View this article in WRRO
- A model of strongly biased chemotaxis reveals the trade-offs of different bacterial migration strategies. Mathematical Medicine and Biology A Journal of the IMA. View this article in WRRO
- Microfluidics with fluid walls. Nature Communications, 8(1). View this article in WRRO
- Reply to Baveye and Darnault: Useful models are simple and extendable. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(4), E2804-E2804. View this article in WRRO
- Microbial competition in porous environments can select against rapid biofilm growth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(2), E161-E170. View this article in WRRO
- Single-cell twitching chemotaxis in developing biofilms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(23), 6532-6537. View this article in WRRO
- Turbulence drives microscale patches of motile phytoplankton. Nature Communications, 4(1).
- Division by fluid incision: Biofilm patch development in porous media. Physics of Fluids, 24(9), 091107-091107.
- Thin Phytoplankton Layers: Characteristics, Mechanisms, and Consequences. Annual Review of Marine Science, 4(1), 177-207.
- Microbial alignment in flow changes ocean light climate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(10), 3860-3864.
- Chemotactic response of marine bacteria to the extracellular products of Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus. Aquatic Microbial Ecology, 59, 161-168.
- Tumbling for Stealth?. Science, 325(5939), 400-402.
- Disruption of Vertical Motility by Shear Triggers Formation of Thin Phytoplankton Layers. Science, 323(5917), 1067-1070.
- Transport of topological defects in a biphasic mixture of active and passive nematic fluids. Communications Physics, 7(1).
- Individual bacterial cells can use spatial sensing of chemical gradients to direct chemotaxis on surfaces. Nature Microbiology, 9(9), 2308-2322.
- Elongation enhances migration through hydrodynamic shear. Physical Review Fluids.
- Suicidal chemotaxis in bacteria. Nature Communications, 13(1).
- Correction: Biofilm Formation As a Response to Ecological Competition. PLOS Biology, 13(8), e1002232-e1002232.
- Turbulent Fluid Acceleration Generates Clusters of Gyrotactic Microorganisms. Physical Review Letters, 112(4).
- Gyrotaxis in a Steady Vortical Flow. Physical Review Letters, 106(23).
- Biofilm Formation As a Response to Ecological Competition. PLoS Biology, 13(7).
- On the thin-film asymptotics of
surface-tension-driven microfluidics. Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
Conference proceedings papers
- Clustering of gyrotactic microorganisms in turbulent flows. ETC 2013 - 14th European Turbulence Conference
- Clustering of gyrotactic microorganisms in turbulent flows. ETC 2013 - 14th European Turbulence Conference
- Gyrotactic clustering from turbulent acceleration. ETC 2013 - 14th European Turbulence Conference
- Gyrotactic clustering from turbulent acceleration. ETC 2013 - 14th European Turbulence Conference
- Bacterial chemotaxis during biofilm formation. IUTAM Symposium on Motile Cells in Complex Environments, MCCE 2018 (pp 61-62)
- Vertical migration of motile phytoplankton chains through turbulence. IUTAM Symposium on Motile Cells in Complex Environments, MCCE 2018 (pp 25)
- Pressure-Induced Subsurface Sediment Transport in the Surf Zone. Coastal Sediments '07
Preprints
- The structure of the Tad pilus alignment complex reveals a periplasmic conduit for pilus extension, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- Evidence of robust, universal conformal invariance in living biological matter, arXiv.
- Bacteria use spatial sensing to direct chemotaxis on surfaces.
- Reconfigurable microfluidic circuits for isolating and retrieving cells of interest, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- Suicidal chemotaxis in bacteria, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- Tracking bacteria at high density with FAST, the Feature-Assisted Segmenter/Tracker, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- Bacteria solve the problem of crowding by moving slowly. Nature Physics. View this article in WRRO
- Grants
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- New Investigator Award, BBSRC, £517K (2018-2021, PI)
- SHAMROK pump priming grant, EPSRC £10K (2017, PI)
- Long-Term Fellowship, Human Frontier Science Programme, £85K (2012-2016, PI)
- Teaching activities
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Undergraduate modules
- PHY1001 Motion & Heat (practical classes)
- PHY119 Frontiers of Physics (Topic: The physics of microbial life)
- PHY248 Physics with Labview
- PHY230 Experimental Physics I
- PHY231 Experimental Physics II
- PHY393/PHY393N Microscopy and Spectroscopy
Undergraduate projects
- PHY342 3rd Year Research project
- PHY480 4th Year Research project
Masters level modules
- PHY6510 The Theory and Practical Application of Imaging (Topics: phase contrast and DIC microscopy)
Previously taught modules
- PHY101 - Optics (Autumn 2017, Autumn 2018)
- Professional activities and memberships
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Awards
- BBSRC New Investigator Award for "How do bacteria sense and navigate chemical gradients within biofilms?" (£517K)
- Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Long-Term Fellowship, Oxford University, UK (2012-2016)
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship: Intersections of Biology and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (gratefully declined)
- Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics, an annual prize for the best doctoral thesis in the area of fluid dynamics, American Physical Society - Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS-DFD)
- Raymond L Lindeman Award, an annual award for the best paper in aquatic sciences written by an author under 35 years old. American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO)
Departmental administration
- Head of Undergraduate Admissions (Oct 2019-present)
- Lecturer Listening Coordinator (Jan 2018-present)
- Degree with Employment Experience Coordinator (June 2018-present)