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Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…

We show that it is possible to learn protocols that effect fast and efficient state-to-state transformations in simulation models of active particles. By encoding the protocol in the form of a neural network we use evolutionary methods to…

Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…

Living matter moves, deforms, and organizes itself. In cells this is made possible by networks of polymer filaments and crosslinking molecules that connect filaments to each other and that act as motors to do mechanical work on the network.…

Pattern formation often occurs in confined systems, yet how boundaries shape patterning dynamics is unclear. We develop techniques to analyze confinement effects in nonlocal advection-diffusion equations, which generically capture the…

Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…

Signatures of glassy dynamics have been identified experimentally for a rich variety of materials in which molecular networks provide rigidity. Here we present a theoretical framework to study the glassy behavior of both passive and active…

Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…

Understanding how the structure of within-system interactions affects the dynamics of the system is important in many areas of science. We extend a network dynamics modeling platform DSGRN, which combinatorializes both dynamics and…

Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…

Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…

Many observables of brain dynamics appear to be optimized for computation. Which connectivity structures underlie this fine-tuning? We propose that many of these structures are naturally encoded in the space that more directly relates to…

Incorporating cells within active biomaterial scaffolds is a promising strategy to develop forefront materials that can autonomously sense, respond, and alter the scaffold in response to environmental cues or internal cell circuitry. Using…

Interaction between active materials and the boundaries of geometrical confinement is key to many emergent phenomena in active systems. For living active matter consisting of animal cells or motile bacteria, the confinement boundary is…

Networks are ubiquitous throughout science and engineering. A number of methods, including some from our own group, have explored how one goes about computing or predicting the dynamics of networks given information about internal models of…

The collective action of actively contractile units embedded in elastic biopolymer networks plays a crucial role in regulating the network's macroscopic mechanical response. Here, we investigate how the macroscopic boundary stress in model…

The understanding of neural activity patterns is fundamentally linked to an understanding of how the brain's network architecture shapes dynamical processes. Established approaches rely mostly on deviations of a given network from certain…

Many natural systems are organized as networks, in which the nodes (be they cells, individuals or populations) interact in a time-dependent fashion. The dynamic behavior of these networks depends on how these nodes are connected, which can…

Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…

The interplay of membrane proteins is vital for many biological processes, such as cellular transport, cell division, and signal transduction between nerve cells. Theoretical considerations have led to the idea that the membrane itself…