NANO BIO SOFT

SOFT MATTER

Interactions between soft surfaces are encountered all the time in daily life. We find them everywhere - in living cells, polymers, colloids, liquid crystals, foams and so on. The word “soft” characterizes not just the stiffness of the objects involved but also the interaction potential. To qualify as “soft”, the stiffness of the interaction potential must be of the order of the thermal energy kBT (kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the temperature). I have been interested in the structure, dynamics and interactions of diverse soft matter like lyotropic liquid crystals, colloidal beads, lipid monolayers, and lipid membranes in the form of supported bilayers or giant unilamellar vesicles.

BIO PHYSICS

Biological systems are complex and specific. Biophysics aims to study such systems using concepts, techniques and tools of physical sciences with the ultimate goal of discovering underlying unifying general concepts. Biophysics spans all levels of biological organization, from the molecular scale to whole organisms and ecosystems. I am interested in the physics of the cell, from its component parts to inter-cellular interactions at the tissue level. On one hand I make realistic models of cells using giant unilamellar vesicles and on the other hand I study real cells under controlled conditions. The two approaches are complementary and help realize a consistent picture of physical processes in the cell.

 

NANO SCIENCE

Nanoscience is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale (according to the definition of Richard Fynmann in “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”). How small? “When surface effects are important” or “when size matters” or simply (wikipedia) when “... at least one dimension is sized from 1 to 100 nanometres ”. In fact, nanoscience deals with the level of few molecules where neither the simplicity of statistical mechanics arising from large numbers, nor the elegance of quantum mechanics, is applicable. I use tools of nanoscience and nanotechnology to probe the working of living cells with the goal of understanding the working of the cell at the nanoscale.

SYNINTER

The project “Smart interrogation of the immune synapse by nano-patterned and soft 3D substrates" is funded by ERC under the starting grants scheme. The project aims to design innovative substrates and suitable detection techniques to understand better the dynamics and spatial organization associated with inter-cellular adhesion in general and the immunological synapse in particular.