On September 16-17, I attended the Physics of Living Matter conference organized by the Turing Centre for Living Systems in Marseille. The great view from the conference venue combined with many cool talks led to a very nice conference.

I attended Dynamics Days Europe 2024 in Bremen. As always, this conference was a stimulating mix of topics ranging from billiards (the mathematical kind) to climate dynamics and vegetation pattern formation. On Monday I presented our current work on pattern formation in multicellular systems on bounded domains.

Together with the Young Marsilius Fellows of the Marsilius Kolleg of Heidelberg University, we organized an event with discussions, talks, games and an exhibition with posters from our 'Data is Art' competition. The title was 'From end to Beginning: An Interdisciplinary Adventure'. We talked about our research and how we found unexpected connections between very different fields, we had discussions about the meaning of heritage and opened up the black box of progress in science.

It was a great afternoon and I think the participants enjoyed it a lot.

I contributed a computer game where players have to cooperate and communicate in order to accomplish a common goal (see also Outreach).

Some years ago during my PhD work, we came up with a new method of modeling bistable switches, based on a modification of the Hill function. We used it to model the transitions between different phases of the cell cycle, described in our 2021 paper. Now, these models have been chosen as one of the three winners of the competition 'Model of the Year 2023'. This competition is held by the BioModels website, and aims to promote reproducibility and good modeling practice in systems biology. I'm happy to be among the winners! Thanks to Jolan and Lendert for working together on the paper. Also check out this year's competition: Model of the Year 2024.

Together with Jenna and Anna, we wrote a review paper on mechanochemical pattern formation. We illustrate using a range of examples how mechanical processes such as flows and forces can be important in the formation of biological patterns. Thanks to Jenna and Anna, and also to the many people who gave feedback on the manuscript!

I will visit Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo at UPF and Vikas Trivedi at EMBL Barcelona from October 31st to November 14th. Looking forward to discussing my current research and exchanging ideas!

From October 2023 to 2024 I will be one of the Young Marsilius Fellows. This fellowship is awarded by the Marsilius Kolleg of Heidelberg University, with as goal to promote interdisciplinarity and science communication. With postdocs from a wide variety of fields, we will be discussing and exchanging ideas, with as goal the organization of a symposium in July 2024. The leading motto of this year is 'Beginning & End'. The first session was already very enriching and I look forward to our other exchanges!

On the 8th of July we had lab day at EMBL. With the Erzberger group we prepared some games to illustrate physical principles that underlie biological phenomena. We had a game involving surface tension and floating paperclips, a game with pattern formation and a computer game designed to illustrate what life is like at high and low Reynolds numbers. In this game you play either as a whale or as a bacterium, whose motion is dominated by inertia and friction respectively. The goal was to catch the lab members while avoiding being caught by a swimming Osborne Reynolds.

The paper with the Gelens lab on delay-induced oscillations is now out in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. In this paper, which was a collaboration with master student Sarah Verplaetse, we revisited a classical topic in mathematical biology: biological oscillators.

Periodic processes are present in many biological systems such as the circadian clock, the cell cycle or somitogenesis. The periodicity of these processes manifests, among others, in the repeated production and degradation of molecules. The interaction between different proteins that generates these cycles often contains a time-delayed negative feedback loop. Negative feedback can take different forms, and in this paper we compare two ways of implementing it: on the production step or on the degradation step. We show how these mechanisms impose different constraints on the rate constants that allow oscillations, and derive some mathematical results about simple delay equations that describe the system.

The picture on the left shows spirals in the complex plane, which we use to study the existence of oscillations in systems with a distributed delay.

This summer I'll be presenting a poster on my current work on pattern formation in the somitogenesis system at two conferences. First, in July, there is the EMBL Symposium on Theory and Concepts in Biology here in Heidelberg. In August I'll cross the channel and participate in the workshop on Collective Behaviour at the INI in Cambridge. If you are at one of these events and want to have a chat, feel free to get in touch!