Welcome to our lab website. We are an experimental group working in the field of active and living matter physics. Living matter simply means systems that are literally alive, typically consume food, and show motility. For example, you are a living matter. Each and every cell in your body, including its sub-components, is also a living matter. If you create a non-living system that moves like living organisms, then we call it active matter. For example, robots, drones, vehicles, etc.

In our lab, we work with mechanical imitations of living organisms with the primary goal of understanding the laws that govern the properties of living organisms at a single and collective scale. For instance, origin of motility in microorganisms to flocking tendency of animals. More specifically, we design and develop programmable robotic devices to mimic bio- and nature-inspired active dynamics. We perform our research using the tools developed in the fields of Statistical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Biological Physics, and Liquid crystals.

The other aim of the group is to investigate the physics of Soft Condensed Matter. Constituents of such materials are typically micrometers large (a thousand times bigger than an atom) and bonded together with energies of the order of a few kBT (i.e. a hundred times weaker than typical covalent bonds). We explore problems related to the evaporative self-assembly of anisotropic colloidal particles, the physics of static and active granular matter, and the physics of the cell cytoskeleton. For more information, visit the list of publications.