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Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
Brain organoids recapitulate a number of brain properties, including neuronal diversity. However, do they recapitulate brain structure? Using a hydrodynamic description for cell nuclei as particles interacting initially via an effective,…
The study of organoids, artificially grown cell aggregates with the functionality and small-scale anatomy of real organs, is one of the most active areas of research in biology and biophysics, yet the basic physical origins of their…
The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…
We use a three-dimensional formulation of the cell vertex model to describe the mechanical properties of a confluent planar monolayer of prismatic cells. Treating cell height as a degree of freedom, we reduce the model to a two-dimensional…
In this article, we propose a general framework to study the dynamics and topology of cellular networks that capture the geometry of cell packings in two-dimensional tissues. Such epithelia undergo large-scale deformation during…
Topological phases of quantum matter defy characterization by conventional order parameters but can exhibit quantized electro-magnetic response and/or protected surface states. We examine such phenomena in a model for three-dimensional…
An important open question in the modeling of biological tissues is how to identify the right scale for coarse-graining, or equivalently, the right number of degrees of freedom. For confluent biological tissues, both vertex and Voronoi…
This paper gives an exposition of the authors' harmonic deformation theory for 3-dimensional hyperbolic cone-manifolds. We discuss topological applications to hyperbolic Dehn surgery as well as recent applications to Kleinian group theory.…
The vertex model of epithelia describes the apical surface of a tissue as a tiling of polygonal cells, with a mechanical energy governed by deviations in cell shape from preferred, or target, area, $A_0$, and perimeter, $P_0$. The model…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
The Voronoi-based cellular model is highly successful in describing the motion of two-dimensional confluent cell tissues. In the homogeneous version of this model, the energy of each cell is determined solely by its geometric shape and…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
Two-dimensional higher-order topology is usually studied in (nearly) particle-hole symmetric models, so that an edge gap can be opened within the bulk one. But more often deviates the edge anticrossing even into the bulk, where corner…
The scope of this Ph.D thesis is to study the effects of the presence of a boundary from a Quantum Field Theoretical perspective, searching for new physics and explanations of observed phenomena. In particular, thanks to the formal QFT…
Tissue deformations during morphogenesis can be active, driven by internal processes, or passive, resulting from stresses applied at their boundaries. Here, we introduce the Drosophila hindgut primordium as a model for studying…