Understanding the intrinsic nature of collective phenomena in living and non-living matter represents one of the most fascinating and interdisciplinary challenges in modern soft matter and biophysics research. My overarching goal as a scientist is to capture the physical origins of collective phenomena via numerical methods and harness their potential for biological and engineering applications. 

Collective behavior is all around us: people walking in line follow the same steps as the person in front of them, bacteria spontaneously assemble in dense aggregate to preserve the colony in the absence of nutrients, brain cells coordinate in order to deliver information across the human body.  I am particularly interested in borrowing ideas and tools developed for soft matter physics and using them to understand phenomena where single constituents cooperate and sense each other’s presence, assemble into mesoscopic structures and eventually deliver a global response designed for the environment they experience.