About his research

Self-organized deformation of biological tissues

During animal development and regeneration, tissues and organs grow and deform in a self-organized manner. We want to focus on oriented deformation processes, for which many examples exist throughout development. How can self-organized, oriented tissue deformation be robust? This is far from obvious, because many existing physical theories predict instabilities of such oriented actively deforming materials. We want to understand how the occurrence of such instabilities can be prevented (or even harnessed) during developmental processes and establish quantitative criteria for that.

Collaborations exist with the group of Thomas Lecuit on epithelial flows and invaginations during Drosophila embryogenesis and with the group of Pierre-Francois Lenne on gastruloid deformation.

Mechanical properties of disordered systems

How do large-scale properties of disordered systems arise from the complex interplay of their microscopic constituents? This question is important to understand a large class of materials both living and non-living. In a recent publication we have already shown that one can make surprisingly general analytical predictions about the elastic macroscopic properties of the broad class of athermal, under-constrained materials. This is relevant to understand systems as diverse as semiflexible polymer networks like collagen and cell-based models for biological tissue. We want to extend these ideas in several directions, e.g to over-constrained materials, to include finite temperatures, and to include reversible cross-linkers. This will allow us to more accurately predict the macroscopic properties of many disordered materials and directly link them to their microscopic structure.