University of Pennsylvania Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

In multicellular organisms, properly programmed collective motion is required to form tissues and organs, and this programming breaks down in diseases like cancer. Recent experimental work highlights that some organisms tune the global mechanical properties of a tissue across a fluid-solid transition to allow or prohibit cell motion and control processes such as body axis elongation. In this talk, I will highlight universal features that emerge from models developed to predict this collective behavior. I will discuss a related theoretical framework that helps to explain this universality and suggests the origin of rigidity in tissues is similar to that in mechanical metamaterials, like origami, and different from those in standard materials like glasses or granular matter.