ELS KOFFEMAN POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW
As an applied mathematician, I construct mechanistic, computational, and material models to predict emergent behaviours in biological systems. My current research focuses on the themes of synchronisation (cilia and flagella), self-organisation (bacterial aggregation, motor self-assembly), and complex motion in fluids (bio-inspired robots, propulsion in yield-stress fluids, and Marangoni-driven filaments). My work is highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from biological fluid mechanics, asymptotic methods, and dynamical systems. I especially enjoy collaborating with experimentalists and designing macroscopic-scale experiments that bring the physics of microorganisms to life.
Short bio. I joined the Soft Matter Group at the University of Amsterdam as the inaugural Els Koffeman Postdoctoral Fellow in July 2025, after holding the Lynden-Bell Research Fellowship in Mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge. Before that, I was a postdoctoral research associate of Prof. Jean-François Joanny at the Collège de France and carried out my doctoral studies in Prof. Eric Lauga's group at the University of Cambridge.
In our latest preprint, we explore how swimming bacteria aggregate in nematic liquid crystals, a complex fluid environment relevant to many biological settings. Through experiments and theory, we show that aggregation is fundamentally limited by the bacteria's own swimming behaviour, offering new insight into how active matter organises itself in structured fluids.
This study reveals how cells adhere to and spread on fluid membranes, driven by mechanosensitive receptor kinetics. Using functionalized lipid bilayers as a model system, we uncover a physical pathway linking cytoskeletal dynamics to adhesion, and propose a mean-field theoretical model that explains the observed receptor clustering as a phase-separation process.
Does the swimming speed of a multiflagellated bacterium increase indefinitely with the number of flagella? In this paper, we show that above a critical number of flagella, the hydrodynamic interactions between flagella and the limited torque-generating capacity of the motor slow the bacteria down, reshaping how we think about multiflagellated swimming.