Research

Research Topics

Overview

Understanding the physics of living matter poses fundamental challenges for theory. These are stochastic many-body systems operating far from thermal equilibrium, posing our systems of interest at the cutting edge of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and stochastic thermodynamics.

Recently, there has been a surge in the production of high-quality quantitative data on biological systems, such as chromosome capture experiments on bacteria or time-lapse microcopy experiments of the cytoskeletal machinery of migrating cells. These data reveal intricate stochastic dynamics and striking organizational features, but it is challenging to interpret such behaviors. We seek to unravel such complex data to uncover the physics underlying the organization and dynamics of biological systems directly from experiments. In addition to our work on bottom-up theoretical approaches, we therefore also invest strongly in data-driven theoretical approaches. We develop approaches to infer the large-scale organization of the bacterial chromosome from Hi-C data, determine the dynamics of confined cell migration, and to extract non-equilibrium information by monitoring the stochastic dynamics of living systems.