How do the macroscopic dynamics of biological systems arise from the interplay of its microscopic constituents?

We want to better understand how cells organize into tissues during animal development:

• How do cell fate dynamics interact with mechanics to give rise to the head-to-tail body axis?
• How do cells coordinate to allow for robust anisotropic deformation during development?
• How does curvature affect the behavior of tissues?

But we are also interested in the properties of soft materials more generally:

• How do the mechanical properties of disordered networks depend on their structure?

We address these questions through close collaborations with experimentalists, and develop the theories along with data analysis approaches. We use a combination of analytical and computational approaches, and study agent-based as well as coarse-grained models.

The Merkel lab is part of the Turing Center for Living Systems, and is hosted at the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University.