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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…

The aim of this talk is to look at soft random solids through the lens of condensed matter theory, and to explore how their core features -- most notably their random structure and elasticity…

While the equilibrium properties, states, and phase transitions of interacting systems are well described by statistical mechanics, the lack of suitable state parameters has hindered the…

Biomolecules can self-assemble into liquid phases, termed ‘membraneless organelles’ in the biological context, though also known as ‘coacervates’. I will discuss our efforts…

Active flocking on curved surfaces, such as the 2-sphere and the catenoid, exhibits dynamical symmetry breaking in the form of spontaneous flow, calculable inhomogeneous density patterns and…

The challenge of separating emulsified oil from oil/water mixture has sparked enormous research interests in developing advanced membrane technology. One of the most crucial elements to achieve high…

Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in nature. Many biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as…