Fridtjof Brauns Group

MPI-CBG > Forschung > Forschungsgruppen > Übersicht > Fridtjof Brauns > Research Focus

Living and Morphing Matter Theory

I'm broadly interested in self-organization in living systems: How does biology control and harness physical instabilities? How does geometry emerge from genes during development? Addressing these questions requires briding the scales from cells to tissues and organs. I use concepts and ideas from theoretical physics, dynamical systems, and geometry, working in close collaboration with experimentalists.

Morphogenesis

  • Cell and tissue mechanics
  • Where and how is shape encoded? (Top-down genetic control vs bottom-up self-organization)
  • Patterning of morphogenetic anisotropy fields

Non-reciprocal pattern formation

  • Non-reciprocal Cahn-Hilliard equation
  • Can the lens of non-reciprocal interactions provide a new unifying understanding of far-from-equilibrium pattern formation
  • What are the principles of nonlinear pattern selection?

Protein patterns and mass-conserving reaction–diffusion systems

  • Generalize phase-portrait analysis to spatially extended systems
  • Coarsening and pattern selection
  • Intracellular pattern formation and evolution of the underlying protein interaction networks

Join us

We are hiring PhD students and Postdocs interested in morphogenesis, tissue mechanics, pattern formation, and more.

Interested? Please send us an email at brauns(at)mpi-cbg.de.

Videos from our publications

Nonreciprocal pattern formation of conserved fields. Fridtjof Brauns and M. Cristina Marchetti. Phys. Rev. X 14, 021014 (2024)

Patterning of morphogenetic anisotropy fields. Z. Wang, M. Cristina Marchetti, and Fridtjof Brauns. PNAS 120 (13), e2220167120 (2023)