Details
Organizers: Ricard Alert, Daniel Cohen, Celeste Nelson, Ned Wingreen
During development, wound healing, and tumor invasion, eukaryotic cells often move in groups. Bacteria also migrate in groups during swarming and aggregation of bacterial colonies. These collective movements rely on the transmission and coordination of physical forces among cells. In the last decade, new imaging and measurement techniques have enabled detailed mapping of physical quantities like velocity and force fields during collective cell migration. This technological revolution has coincided with the development of the theory of active matter, which provides a powerful framework to rationalize the spontaneous movements of cell groups as collections of interacting self-propelled objects. The coincidence in time of these different advances has placed collective cell migration at the center stage of research at the interface between the life and physical sciences.
This workshop will bring together people working on collective cell migration using different approaches, both theoretical and experimental, and in different biological contexts, from in vitro and in vivo tissues to bacterial colonies. This way, we hope to highlight the commonalities and differences between the physics of collective cell migration in different systems. The workshop will provide opportunities to foster discussions and new collaborations, especially between theorists and experimentalists.
- PCTS
- Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science
- Chemical and Biological Engineering Department, Princeton University
- Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, Princeton University
- Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University