Research projects

🚧 Under construction

Right now this is a collection of my postdoc and PhD projects. The later projects give the flavours of what our group will do. This page is slowly being updated.. a random amount of effort has been put into writing up each project. If you have any questions / ideas concerning any of my projects, please reach out!

Mechanics in non-canonical cell divisions

The cell divisions in textbooks are complete cleavage, but zebrafish, amoungst many other fish and reptiles, undergo incomplete (meroblastic) cleavage during the early stages of their embryo development. How do these divisions happen?

Mitotic waves

The timing of early embryonic cell divisions organises into travelling “mitotic waves” that originates at the top of the embryo ambryo and propagages towards the yolk. Is this regulated top-down or self-organised? Some back-of-envolope calculations and perturbation experiments would tell us the answer.

Active rods

We build active elastic beams from dozens of active colloids and study their emergent behaviour — self-oscillations and persistent rotations — as a minimal, controllable realisation of an active solid.

Hes waves in somitogenesis

Somitogenesis is probably the most famous biological system with phase waves. We found the cell cycles to be coupled to the Hes cycles. What are the consequences?

Phase waves in spermatogenesis

Retinoic-acid signalling in the mouse testis oscillates and travels as phase waves along the seminiferous tubule. We build a time-delayed model of the local cycle and a Kuramoto-type spatial model, showing that the waves emerge naturally from coupled cyclic dynamics.

Liquid-state theory of active matter

Can the virial expansion of liquid-state theory be extended to active particles? We derive the coarse-grained density dynamics of self-propelled particles from first principles — with no equilibrium free-energy assumption — and recover the signatures of motility-induced phase separation.

COVID-19 modelling

During the pandemic I worked on epidemiological modelling of COVID-19 as part of the Royal Society RAMP (Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic) initiative. We used a van Kampen expansion based inference scheme to improve speed and accuracy even when the population size is small.

Model AB and its extensions

A programme of work building a canonical field theory — “Model AB” — for phase-separating active systems with chemical reactions, where the conserved and non-conserved dynamics need not derive from a shared free energy, and its extensions to richer non-equilibrium behaviour.

Entropy production of scalar Langevin systems

How much does a coarse-grained active field theory break time-reversal symmetry? We develop a general method to compute the entropy production rate of scalar Langevin field theories, together with a tractable small-noise expansion that we demonstrate on Model AB.

Introduction to active matter

A popular-science introduction to active matter pitched at maths & physics undergraduates. Why should we be interested in this novel class of non-equilibrium systems?