Soft Matter Seminar: Professor Nikta Fakhri – “Broken symmetries in living matter”

Join us for the Soft Matter Seminar on Friday April 22, 11am EST:

Professor Nikta Fakhri, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Broken symmetries in living matter

Active processes in living systems create a novel class of nonequilibrium matter composed of many interacting components 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 fluctuations, order, and self-organization in systems in which individual components break time reversal symmetry. I will describe how these frameworks provide powerful insight into dynamics of nonequilibrium living systems across scales, from the emergence of thermodynamic arrow of time to spatiotemporal organization of signaling protein patterns and discovery of odd elasticity.

Please contact contact Minh-Tri Ho Thanh at mhothanh@syr.edu for the zoom link.