News

Cristina Marchetti elected to the National Academy of Sciences!
Congratulations to graduate student Suraj Shankar who will join the prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows as Junior Fellow starting in Summer 2019!
Cristina Marchetti to receive the 2019 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize from the American Physical Society at the 2019 March Meeting of the APS in Boston.
David Yllanes, Marco Leoni, and Cristina Marchetti’s paper was accepted in the New Journal of Physics on September 25, 2017.
The article “Topological Sound and Flocking on Curved Surfaces’’ by Suraj Shankar, Mark Bowick, and Cristina Marchetti appears today in Physical Review X with a Synopsis in Physics
Welcome to new postdoc Benjamin Loewe who joins us from Georgia Tech!

June 2017: Former group postdoc Pragya Srivastava (now at the Crick Institute in London) gets married in Philadelphia. Congratulations, Pragya! Stay tuned for photos of the Indian ceremony on Feb 18th, 2018, in the city of Allahabad, India.

Paper: Flocks on a sphere and topological sound Topological Sound and Flocking on Curved Surfaces, Shankar, M. J. Bowick and M. C. Marchetti to appear in Physical Review X Stay tuned for a Viewpoint in Physics!
Several group members participated in the 2017 Soft Matter GRS and GRC at Colby-sawyer and presented their work
Cristina Marchetti presented lectures on Active Matter at the XIV International Summer School on Fundamental problems in Statistical Physics in Bruneck, Italy
Cristina Marchetti gave an invited talk on “Dynamics and Topology of Active Liquid Crystals’’ at the 2017 Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry & Physics of Liquids in Holderness, NH
Congratulations to Kazage Utuje who successfully defended his thesis, titled “Continuum Models of Collective Migration in Living Tissues.” Kazage will be taking on a position at Manlius Pebble Hill School.
Congratulations to Prashant Mishra who successfully defended his thesis, titled “Pattern formation in active nematics”! Prashant will be taking on a position at the Galloway School in Atlanta.
Suraj Shankar selected as KITP Graduate Fellow for 2017
Cristina Marchetti signs the Ehrenfest wall after delivering the Colloquium Ehrenfestii in Leiden on April 19, 2017
New “Science Minute” video from the MoST features Michael Czajkowski
Adam Patch founds new Graduate Science Policy Group at SU
Shiladitya Banerjee joins University College London as Strategic Fellow at the Institute for the Physics of Living Systems (IPLS).
Congratulations to Adam Patch and Michael Czajkowski who have passed their research oral!
Cristina Marchetti speaks at the Workshop `Women in Applied Maths and Soft Matter Physics‘, 25-28 Oct 2015 Mainz (Germany).
Congratulations to Prashant Mishra and Kazage Utuje who passed their research oral!
The work Propagating stress waves during epithelial expansion with Shiladitya Banerjee and Kazage Utuje has appeared in Physical Review Letters and was highlighted as an Editor’s Suggestion.
5/4/15 – Cristina Marchetti speaks at The Tony and Pat Houghton Conference on Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics, May 4-5, 2015, Brown University Dynamics and Topology of Active Liquids Crystals
7/15/15 – Xingbo Yang celebrates the successful defense of his dissertation. He is now a Joint Post Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Department of Engineering Sciences & Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University working with David Schwab and Madhav Mani.
5/14/15 – Marchetti awarded a Simons Foundation Targeted Grant from the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems program for the study of collective cell migration
5/12/15-5/16/15 – Cristina Marchetti speaks at the Conference on Physics of Active Matter, Suzhou, China, on Collective Mechanics of Active Matter
Our paper “Topology and dynamics of active nematic vesicles” (Keber et al., Science 345, 1135) has been selected as cover story in Science. The paper, is the result of a collaboration with the experimental groups of Andreas Bausch (Technische Universität München) and Zvonimir Dogic (Brandeis University).
2/1/15 – Graduate Student, Kazage Utuje is one of this year’s recipients of the Shirley Chan Student Travel Award from the Division of Biological Physics (DBIO) of the American Physical Society (APS). This year, 11 students were awarded the same travel grants of up to $400 per each student as the first author of contributed paper (talk or poster) in sessions sponsored by DBIO at the upcoming March Meeting. The recipients were chosen on the basis of the quality of their work and will be honored at the DBIO Business Meeting in San Antonio, Texas on Tuesday, March 03, 2015.
12/14/14 – Prof. Marchetti gave an invited talk, “Topology and Dynamics in Active Nematics” at the 112th Statistical Mechanics Conference, Rutgers University.
12/3/14 – Prof Marchetti gave an invited talk, “Active granular matter: phase separation, sorting and jamming”, at the KITP program on Avalanches, Intermittency, and Nonlinear Response in Far-From-Equilibrium Solids”.
6/24/2013 – Shiladitya Banerjee gives a contributed presentation at the Workshop on Dynamics of active suspensions, gels, cells and tissues at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK]
6/14/2013-6/17/2013 – Shiladitya gets married in Berhampore, India. Click here for a photograph. Shiladitya will then start as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Chicago.
6/12/2013 – Cristina Marchetti gives an Invited talk at the 2013 SIAM Conference on Mathematical aspects of Materials Science in Philadelphia, PA.
6/2/2013-6/7/2013 – Graduate student Kazage Utuje attends Soft Solids and Complex Fluids 2013 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
6/5/2013 – Cristina Marchetti presents her work at the International Focus Workshop on Connecting Theory and Experiments in Active Matter held in Dresden, Germany.
5/13/2013 – Shiladitya receives his PhD and is awarded the 2013 All University Doctoral Prize
5/9/2013 – Cristina Marchetti speaks at the 2013 GRC on Self-Assembly and Supramolecular Chemistry in les Diablerets, Switzerland.
5/7/2013 – Cristina Marchetti is awarded a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. See announcement in the “Science Times” section of the May 7 edition of the New York Times.
4/10/2013 Cristina Marchetti speaks at the Workshop on Nonlinear Analysis of Continuum Theories: Statics and Dynamics, a Satellite Meeting of the Newton Institute Program on the Mathematics of Liquid Crystals, held at the University of Oxford, UK. A video of the talk can be found here.

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