Experimentally, we study the biophysics of cell assemblages in synthetic ecosystems, today we focus on bacterial systems and study the following three biological processes:

Adaptation: From intracellular networks, chromosome dynamics to cellular morphology, cell-wall and cell cycle regulation.

Cooperation: From cell regulation to collective contracts and public goods in cellular ecosystems, cell-to-cell signalling, cooperative behavior, demography and development.

Evolution: Biological systems are complex adaptive systems. We focus on adaptability and inheritance as evolutionary learning (or biological computation) of cellular systems in on-chip adaptive landscapes.

To tackle these fronts, we are merging evolutionary biology, biological physics, and nanoscience to approach cellular phenomena from multiple scales of biological organization in order to understand the physics of biological complexity.