Research

Research Overview

My work is currently related to research in and at the intersection of the broader fields of statistical physics, biological physics, fluid and solid mechanics, notably known as soft condensed matter. I develop theory and computational methods to explain how collective behavior, in and far from equilibrium, emerges across scales in living and disordered systems.

Currently, I work with the following problems:

Current Topics

Biological membranes

Biological membranes make up the boundaries of cells and other internal organelles. They typically act as selective barriers to different molecules and are responsible for the survival of a cell. Understanding the organization and behavior of biological membranes is important in many biological processes. The physical state of biological membranes at any instant of time may depend on many complex chemical, thermal, mechanical, and interrelated changes in the surroundings. My research concerns understanding the physical principles of organization of biological membranes at all length and time scales. This includes understanding the forces governing the assembly of proteins at the molecular level to morphological transitions at macroscopic levels.

Emergent Bioelectricity

Bioelectricity concerns how cells create, control, and use voltage, ionic currents, and electric fields. A prime example is the action potential: a propagating change in transmembrane voltage driven by coordinated Na⁺ and K⁺ transport through ion channels. My group studies bioelectricity from a first-principles, collective-physics perspective, asking how excitability and conduction arise from interacting channel dynamics, spatial coupling, and cellular geometry, rather than being postulated solely at the level of an equivalent circuit. We are also interested in regimes where electrical activity couples strongly to chemistry and mechanics, such as mechanosensation, where tension-gated and voltage-gated channels influence one another. This work is in close collaboration with my colleague Karthik Shekhar.

Disordered systems, glasses, and amorphous solids

While many materials we study are crystals and liquids, nature presents many examples of disordered systems that have molecular structures like those of liquids yet behave as solids. These include deeply supercooled liquids and amorphous solids. While there are well-developed paradigms to understand crystalline solids and liquids, it remains an active debate how best to describe the behavior of such disordered systems. A central complication is dynamic heterogeneity: molecules can remain mobile in certain regions while the rest of the material appears frozen. This leads to slow relaxation, often referred to as glassy dynamics. Understanding the microscopic origins of glassy dynamics remains an open problem and is essential for designing disordered materials with tailored properties. My work involves developing microscopic theories for the emergence of glassy dynamics and advancing atomistic simulation methods to study these systems using molecular simulations.