Our laboratory investigates the fundamental physical principles underlying the emergence of function 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 electric and ionic stimuli, extending these insights from simplified membrane models to living cells.
We view lipid bilayers as active, adaptive, and memory-bearing systems capable of exhibiting neural-like behavior through collective dipolar dynamics, electromechanical coupling, and plasticity. By linking molecular-scale energy conversion and collective motion to higher-order phenomena such as long-term potentiation, our work seeks to uncover the physical correlates of biological memory encoded directly within membranes. A defining feature of our research is a membrane-to-cell framework, which enables direct, quantitative comparison between synthetic lipid bilayers with precisely controlled composition and electrophysiologically excitable cells.
To interrogate membrane and cellular function across scales, we employ a multidisciplinary toolkit that integrates neutron and X-ray scattering, vibrational and dielectric spectroscopy, molecular dynamics simulations, and advanced electrophysiology. Patch-clamp techniques are applied both to synthetic lipid membranes and to living cells, allowing us to directly relate microscopic collective excitations, such as phonons, hydration modes, and entropic interactions, to macroscopic electrical responses, electromechanical adaptation, and history-dependent behavior.
The insights gained from this work inform the development of field-responsive, neuromorphic, and bio-inspired materials, including memristive and memcapacitive elements, while also providing a physical foundation for understanding how membrane-level dysfunction contributes to disease. Ultimately, our mission is to bridge fundamental physical principles, vibrations, scattering, and collective dynamics, with the biological functions of memory, adaptability, and information processing across scales, from membranes to cells.