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Why did we go to the Moon? Why does the Vatican support an astronomical observatory? These questions mask a deeper question: Why do individuals choose to spend their lives in pursuit of pure…

We discuss how the non-equilibrium driving forces introduced by the natural biological activity or by physical self-propulsion mechanisms generically affect the structure, dynamics and phase behavior…

We perform a stick-slip experiment to characterize avalanches for granular materials. In our experiment, a constant speed stage pulls a slider which rests on a vertical bed of circular photoelastic…

We are taught to understand solids by considering ideal crystals. This approach becomes untenable as the amount of disorder increases; for a glass with no well-defined long-range order, a crystal is…

Though the systematic use of topology to understand defects in ordered matter is now nearly 50 years old, the original work failed to completely characterize systems with broken translational order,…

Symmetry breaking is a ubiquitous phenomenon that occurs spontaneously when a system is subjected to variations in size and/or perturbations in terms of thermodynamic parameters. As a stochastic…

When conventional brittle materials break, long cracks form due to stress focusing at crack tips: a phenomenon explained by Griffith in the 1920s. In this talk, we will discuss two types of systems…

Biological assemblies in nature are seen as active matter due to their ability to perform intelligent collective motion based on neighbor interactions and sometimes without any centralized control…

The evolution of multicellularity set the stage for sustained increases in organismal complexity. However, a fundamental aspect of this transition remains largely unknown: how do simple clusters of…

Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. Here we show that this nonlinearity allows living contractile cells to generate a…