My current research interests are in the field of Biological Physics. My work is focussed on providing a theoretical understanding of biological systems at the scale of the cell, using tools of statistical physics and non-linear dynamics. Living cells are made up of soft active matter, which is an exciting and challenging class of materials. Lipid membranes, polymers, colloids and liquid crystals that constitute the subcellular world possess not only passive but also active interacting elements, which irreversibly transform chemical energy into mechanical work and motion. The active elements lead to a highly non-equilibrium system and endow the composite cellular structures with novel physical properties. For instance, biological soft matter presents a complex spatio-temporal hierarchy of organization, related not only with structure but also activity. Therefore, these active biological materials provide a scarcely explored frontier of non-equilibrium physics. In particular, my current research topics include:

During my Ph.D. I also applied theoretical concepts such as field-theoretical renormalization group and scaling, as well as numerical simulations, to investigate the universality class of physical phenomena far from equilibrium, with special focus on the universality class of directed percolation (DP). DP can be understood as a model to describe, for instance, epidemic spreading, such as the propagation of an infectious disease in a population. The epidemic is typically characterized by two competing processes, namely infection and spontaneous recovery. Depending on the rates for infection and recovery the disease may either disappear or spread over the entire population. These two regimes are separated by a non-equilibrium phase transition. The properties of such a transition depend significantly on the transport mechanism by which the infection is spread. If infected individuals infect their nearest neighbours by direct contact and the susceptibility to infection is independent of previous infections, the model displays a nonequilibrium phase transition which belongs to the universality class of DP.