Our research explores how mechanical forces and active processes shape collective behavior in multicellular systems in several distinct settings.
In one line of work, we studied growing bacterial colonies using both particle-based simulations and an associated multi-scale continuum model, showing that stress-sensitive growth can give rise to large-scale spatial patterns. This study demonstrates how purely mechanical feedback can organize proliferating matter. In a separate effort, we modeled epithelial tissues as thick, viscoelastic slabs in three-dimensions. This continuum framework captures key aspects of morphogenesis, including the initiation of ventral furrow invagination and T1 transitions in developing Drosophila.
More recently, we introduced a biophysical model of cell–cell adhesion that explicitly couples cadherin-based junctions to intercellular actomyosin dynamics, revealing how mechanical linkages across cell boundaries can generate collective polarization, oscillatory behavior, and supracellular stress chains. In ongoing work we are studying how collective motion and packing patterns arise in a wet ensemble of deformable droplets, each encapsulating an active filament suspension.
