Research
Biology, as translates from its Greek roots, is the scientific study of life. My interest in biology is fueled by questions about “What do things look like?”, “How do things function?” and “Why things are the way they are?”. This is naturally manifest in the evolutionary diversity of morphology seen in organisms throughout the natural world. Explorations at the interface of physics and biology remain an ambitious yet exciting endeavor, and my interdisciplinary research on biological physics has deep roots in elasticity, mechanics, statistical mechanics, stochastic processes, geometry, and topology. My group works on two interconnected areas:
Morphology of Living Systems. My overarching goal is to discover physical and biological principles to explain why certain forms may arise in nature, how they function, and how they are shaped over evolutionary time. We develop novel tools and frameworks to describe and quantify different morphologies observed in nature, predominantly at the level of individual organisms and gradually at the collective level.
Physics of non-equilibrium complex systems. A living system is the archetypal example of non-equilibrium system where individual units organized in groups to sense and interact with the environment to promote survivability. We study non-equilibrium processes in nature to understand a range of problems such as Brownian motion, fluctuations, mean first passage time, control of complex networks, and statistical dynamics.
My group is exploring two new ventures:
Collective behavior in nature. Our goal is to understand how patterns arise at the population scale due cooperative actions and interactions of self-optimizing individuals, and to extract general principles on how biological organization happens in nature.
Topology-enhanced physical models for biopolymer. We seek to develop simplicial models for molecular representation, featurization, and learning, particularly in the context of nucleic acids such as double stranded DNA and G-quadruplex, to better understand form-function relationship in biology.