PhD Project - The physics of the cell surface: from molecular rules to cell-scale behaviour at King’s College London, listed on FindAPhD.com

The ability of single active filaments to cluster smaller particles could inspire new materials for building soft robots that perform biological functions.

Cells must coordinate DNA segregation with cytokinesis to ensure that each daughter cell inherits a complete genome. Here, we explore how DNA segre...

A soft jumping robot inspired by nematodes demonstrates ultrafast jumping using reversible kink instability and stiffness.

Malakit had a significant impact on malaria transmission by improving the access to treatment for the population working in illegal gold mining in French Guiana. Building on the regional efforts of th...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Electrostatic interactions play a key role in the behavior of soft and biological matter, yet their complexity increases when particle charge distributions are inhomogeneous. This work presents a unif...

The space writhe of a knot is a property of its three-dimensional embedding that contains information about its underlying topology, but the correspondence between space writhe and other topological i...

Simulations on self-propelling active cubes reveal interesting behaviors at both the individual and the collective level, emphasizing the importance of developing experimental analogues that allow testing these theoretical predictions. The majority of experimental realizations of active colloidal cubes rely on light actuation and/or magnetic fields to have a persistent active mechanism and lack material versatility. Here, we propose a system of active bimetallic cubes whose propulsion mechanism is based on a catalytic reaction and study their behavior. We realize such a system from synthetic silica cuboids and 3D-printed microcubes, followed by the deposition of gold and platinum layers on their surface. We characterize the colloids’ dynamics for different thicknesses of the gold layer at low and high hydrogen peroxide concentrations. We show that the thickness of the base gold layer has only a minor effect on the self-propulsion speed and, in addition, induces a gravitational torque during sedimentation. For low activity, this gravitational torque orients the particles such that their velocity director is pointing out of the plane, thus effectively suppressing propulsion. We find that a higher active force can remedy the effects of torque, resulting in all possible particle orientations, including one with the metal cap on the side, which is favorable for in-plane propulsion. Finally, we use 3D printing to compare our results to cubes made from a different material, size, and roundness and demonstrate that the speed scaling with increasing particle size originates from the size-dependent drag. Our experiments extend the fabrication of active cubes to different materials and propulsion mechanisms and highlight that the design of active particles with anisotropic shapes requires consideration of the interplay between shape and activity to achieve favorable sedimentation and efficient in-plane propulsion.

Simulations show that polymers that include inert and self-propelled components are more likely to form and retain knots, with possible applications in materials engineering.

Simulations show that polymers that include inert and self-propelled components are more likely to form and retain knots, with possible applications in materials engineering.

Classical nucleation theory (CNT) is built upon the capillarity approximation, i.e., the assumption that the nucleation properties can be inferred from the bulk properties of the melt and the crystal....