The Soft Matter and Biophysics group of the Catalan Generalitat (2021 SGR 00450) studies a variety of many-body systems that have characteristic energy scales accessible at room temperature and that are internally characterized by mesoscopic length scales. As a result, these soft materials are easily deformable and have microscopic dynamics and structural features that can be directly imaged using optical methods. This enables addressing many open questions in equilibrium and non-equilibrium physics, nonlinear dynamics, active matter and fluid mechanics.
Equally important is our interest in biophysics. Our studies here are focused on addressing cell differentiation within tissues as a pattern formation problem, characterize the properties of tissues as active matter, exploit colloidal nanoscience to deliver drugs into cells, use fluid flow to characterize the properties of biofluids, and quantify the spatio-temporal dynamics of neural networks.