Soft Matter and Biological Physics Seminar: Jörn Dunkel

Professor Jörn Dunkel, Department of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Programmable living materials and quantitative models of active matter”

Abstract: The last two decades have brought major advances in the understanding of synthetic and biological active matter. A wide variety of experimental model systems, from self-driven colloids to microbial suspensions, make it possible now to explore and control pattern formation far from equilibrium. In parallel, an extensive theoretical framework has been developed to explain many of the experimentally observed self-organization phenomena. Two key challenges for the coming years will be to translate this foundational knowledge into functional active materials, and to infer quantitative mathematical models for complex active systems from experimental data. Here, I will describe joint efforts with our experimental collaborators to realize self-growing bacterial materials [1], and to implement computational model inference schemes for non-living and living active matter [2,3].

[1] Nature 608: 324, 2022
[2] PNAS 120: e2206994120, 2023
[3] eLife 10: e68679, 2021