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Noah Mitchell

@npmitchell.bsky.social

96 followers 46 following 14 posts

physicist studying developmental biology Asst Prof @UChicago

Posts Replies Media

Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

NITMB Fellows Program seeks early-career researchers developing mathematical, theoretical, statistical, or computational approaches to biology. 3 years of full support; a dynamic scientific homebase in downtown Chicago; integration with UChicago+NU Apply by Nov 15: www.nitmb.org/nitmb-fellow...

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

For the looping Drosophila midgut, we predict that early constrictions form stereotyped loops only within a window of remodeling rates—and that rapid growth should widen it.   Shout out again to Nico, whom your department should try to hire!

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The result is a simple design principle: with sufficiently rapid growth, complexity and reproducibility no longer have to compete.   Growth and remodeling rates act as two control knobs determining whether an encoded shape is remembered, simplified, or scrambled.

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Growth breaks the trade-off. As the rod lengthens, a fixed pattern becomes less curved, weakening the drive to coarsen. Noise is also averaged over more material. The pattern can, in effect, outgrow both elastic relaxation and fluctuations.

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

But remodeling is double-edged if there is noise. When it is too fast, the rod becomes nearly fluid-like: random fluctuations are rapidly baked into its rest shape. Complexity remains, but reproducibility is lost.

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

At moderate rates, remodeling helps. If the rest shape adapts before elastic coarsening runs its course, the pattern becomes locked in.

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

However, living tissues remodel. Their stress-free shape gradually adapts to the shape they currently occupy. We built a minimal growing, remodeling rod model to ask whether this adaptation preserves an encoded pattern—or erases it in a different way.

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Noah Mitchell @npmitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Elastic buckling seems like a natural route to complexity. But elasticity alone has a poor memory: a confined rod lowers its energy by replacing many small bends with one broad arc. Fine structure is progressively erased—a process we call elastic coarsening.

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