Contact: Kees Storm

We're working to understand the stuff that we are all made of: soft biological matter. Stuff like proteins, polymers, membranes, fibrous networks and, ultimately, tissues. We're interested in their structure, how they self-assemble, how they deform, how they fail, how they generate forces, how they sense their surroundings and finally, how we may learn from Nature and mimick their design and properties.

In biological materials, these issues generally span multiple scales - both spatial and temporal. We try to cover the essential physics at each of these scales, with particular attention to tying them together into a single, coherent multiscale scheme. Topics in the program run the range from single motors and protein polymers all the way to tissue-scale finite element studies.

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