Our laboratory investigates the fundamental physical principles underlying the emergence of function, adaptation, and memory in soft and living matter. Positioned at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics, biophysics, and membrane neuroscience, we study the structure, dynamics, and electromechanical behavior of lipid membranes under controlled electrical and ionic stimuli, extending these insights from simplified membrane systems to living cells.
We view lipid bilayers as active, adaptive, and potentially memory-bearing systems whose collective dipolar dynamics and electromechanical coupling can generate history-dependent electrical behavior and plasticity. By connecting molecular-scale dynamics, energy transfer, and collective excitations to functional phenomena such as long-term potentiation and adaptation, our work seeks to uncover the physical mechanisms through which biological membranes can encode and retain information. A defining feature of our research is a membrane-to-cell framework that enables direct, quantitative comparison between synthetic lipid membranes of controlled composition and living cells.
To interrogate these phenomena across multiple spatial and temporal scales, we integrate neutron and X-ray scattering, vibrational and broadband dielectric spectroscopy, molecular dynamics simulations, and advanced electrophysiology. Patch-clamp techniques are applied to both synthetic lipid membranes and living cells, allowing us to connect microscopic structure and collective dynamics, including phonons, hydration-mediated interactions, and molecular relaxation processes, with macroscopic electrical responses, electromechanical adaptation, and history-dependent behavior.
The physical principles emerging from this work also inform the development of field-responsive, neuromorphic, and bio-inspired materials, including memcapacitive and memristive systems, while providing new perspectives on how alterations in membrane structure and dynamics may contribute to biological dysfunction. Ultimately, our mission is to bridge fundamental physics, collective dynamics, energy transfer, electromechanics, spectroscopy, and scattering, with biological function, revealing how memory, adaptation, and information processing can emerge across scales from membranes to living cells.