While my PhD was on a hard condensed matter topic (Weakly Interacting Bose Gases in the Fluctuation Region), I switched to biological physics and soft statistical mechanics. My research now is on membrane tethers and soft glassy rheology.

Membranes are arguably the most important building blocks of life. Life consists of cells and cells are compartments made of membranes, most often containing smaller compartmens made of membranes. Most of the cells methods of energy generation - respiration, photosynthesis and chemosynthesis - are membrane-based, with fermentation being the only one which is not. At the same time, membranes are exotic mechanical structures: While they are stable thin films that can be elastic like solids in some contexts, their liquid nature allows shape changes impossible to actual solids.

If we want to understand the cell, we need to understand what makes membranes form vesicles, tubules, cisternea, sheets and envelopes, and what makes those structures fuse, split and shift. To help understand the mechanics of membranes, we investigate the mechanical response of membrane tethers. Tethers are long tubular membrane structures which are remarkably quite a bit more stable than most would expect. They appear in virtually every cell, for example as part of the smooth endoplasmic reticulum.

My other project is trying to build a microscopical model for soft glassy rheology to do soft statistical mechanics. A microscopical model is taken as a basis for numerical simulations and Renormalization Group Theory. These tools are essential for understanding why the viscoelastic modulus, as a function of frequency, follows various power laws, especially weak power laws. Basically, I am importing methods of statistical physics which were highly successful in hard condensed matter into soft condensed matter.