Many innate behaviors are the result of multiple sensorimotor programs that are dynamically coordinated to produce higher-order behaviors such as courtship or architecture. Extended phenotypes such as architecture are especially useful for ethological study because the structure itself is a physical record of behavioral intent. A particularly…

Natural ecological communities display striking features, such as high biodiversity and a wide range of dynamics, that have been difficult to explain in a unified framework. Using experimental bacterial microcosms, we have performed the first direct test of recent theory predicting that simple aggregate parameters…

Photosynthesis presents a paradox of solar energy: the maximum quantum efficiency of photosystem II likely surpasses that of any engineered system, but in environments with high solar flux, photosynthetic organisms are famously wasteful and resource inefficient. For example, even in agricultural systems bred for maximum resource efficiency such…

Membrane curvature is required for many cellular processes, from assembly of highly curved trafficking vesicles to extension of needle-like filopodia. Consequently, defects in membrane curvature play a role in most human diseases, including altered recycling of receptors in cancer and diabetes, targeting of filopodia by pathogens, and hijacking…

Pattern formation is ubiquitous in biological systems. While pattern formations are often associated with Turing-like reaction-diffusion systems, biology also exploits many other mechanisms such as mechanical instabilities and phase separation. In this talk, I will discuss how mechanical instabilities cause the wrinkling of bacterial biofilms…

Gene expression in all organisms is controlled by short DNA and RNA sequences called cis-regulatory elements (CREs). Proteins in the cellular milieu bind to nucleic acid sequences present within CREs, interact with one another, and thus form macromolecular complexes that modulate the expression of nearby genes. My lab uses…

The rod-shaped bacterium Escherichia coli proliferates by a process of elongation, followed by constriction at its centre to create new cell poles. Despite intense study, some apparently simple questions about the dynamics of growth and division in E. coli continue to be debated - these include whether the cell length increases exponentially or…

Active materials such as bacteria, molecular motors and eukaryotic cells continuously transform chemical energy taken from their surroundings to mechanical work. Dense active matter shows mesoscale turbulence, the emergence of chaotic flow structures characterised by high vorticity and self-propelled topological defects. I shall describe the…

Living systems need to remember information about their environment in order to take decisions that ultimately ensure survival. But storing information about past experiences costs energy, while only a fraction of the vast amount of information available can be useful to the living system. An intelligent memory formation strategy should take…

Active processes in living systems create a novel class of non-equilibrium material composed of many interacting parts that individually consume energy and collectively generate motion or mechanical stress. In this talk, I will discuss experimental tools and conceptual frameworks we develop to uncover laws governing order, phase transitions and…

Perception, attention and working memory are fundamental cognitive functions, which are based on parallel processing in many brain areas. Neuronal oscillations at sub-second timescales and their phase correlations a.k.a. phase-synchronization are putative mechanisms for the coordination of neuronal processing and…

One of the characteristic features of many marine dinoflagellates is their bioluminescence, which lights up nighttime breaking waves or seawater sliced
by a ship’s prow. While the internal biochemistry of light production by these microorganisms is well established, the manner by which fluid shear or mechanical
forces trigger…

Morphogenesis, the emergence of functional form in a developing organism, is one of the most remarkable examples of pattern formation in nature. Despite substantial progress, we still do not understand the organizational principles underlying the convergence of this process, across scales, to form viable organisms under variable conditions. We…

Simple organisms manage to thrive in complex environments. Remembering information about the environment is key to take decisions. Physarum polycephalum excels as a giant unicellular eukaryote being even able to solve optimisation problems despite the lack of a nervous system. Here, we follow experimentally the organism's response to a nutrient…