- Ricard Alert (MPI/CSMB): we use and develop the physics of active matter to understand collective behaviors in cells and tissues
- Arvind Murugan: To what extent can living and non-living things be reshaped by their history so as to acquire new function?
- Michael Levin: using electric field or light to perturb at spatial or temporal information propagation in living systems, and discussing how this means the cells are intelligent and/or alive.
- Daniel Sussman: Theoretical and computational soft condensed matter, disordered materials, machine learning
- Tzer Han Tan: how nonequilibrium forces lead to spatiotemporal organization in living matter, and in turn, how biological regulation harness this self-organizing capacity to make functional forms
- Jorn Dunkel: how geometrically frustrated tree packing problems arise during the initial stages of animal development when interconnected cells assemble within a convex enclosure; how the inherent non-locality of incompressible active flow networks can be utilized to construct universal logical operations, Fredkin gates and memory storage in set-reset latches through the synchronized self-organization of many individual network components.
- Orit Peleg: formulate and test phenomenological theories about natural signal design principles and their emergent spatiotemporal patterns
- Andrej Kosmrlj: how living and nonliving (metamaterial, thin shell) systems exploit mechanical instabilities to form patterns.
- Daniel Cohen: using electric fields and material/position setup to tweak stem cell tissue on a plate.
- Saad Bhamla: biomechanics of water skippers, entangled active matter (black worm blob), cheap and small microscope
- Abby Plummer: minimal meaningful models of complex physical systems involving large deformations (growth, fracture)
- Stas Shvartsman: how genomically encoded and self-organizing processes control development