The Dynamics of Shape: From Bacteria to Batteries with Professor Salem Al Mosleh, Colgate University

Living systems grow robustly into a remarkable array of forms, often in the face of external perturbations. Elucidating how this happens is a key challenge in biology, with massive potential applications in living and bio-inspired systems, and will require weaving together tools from mathematics, physics, and biology. Here using bacterial cell envelopes and plant tree leaves as examples of growing structures that can be abstracted as thin elastic shells, I will describe how models — when informed by experiments — can be essential in discovering the regulatory mechanisms involved in controlling shape. Lastly, I will discuss ongoing work connecting data and model-driven approaches and how understanding shape control in living organisms may help us design better solid-state batteries.