Alex Dunn

Our group is an eclectic mixture of physicists, biologists and engineers who are all passionately interested in the problem of how living cells self-assemble into structures of often dazzling complexity. Unlike human-engineered systems, for example a car or computer chip, every aspect of cell and tissue function must arise from bottom-up self-assembly. The physical mechanisms that govern this self-assembly process are largely unknown, making this one of the most interesting problems in biological research today. Understanding how biological self-assembly occurs is also of critical practical importance. At present, tissue engineering is largely driven by empirical, trial-and-error approaches. A deeper understanding of the processes that underlie cell and tissue organization will, over the longer term, help drive the transformation of tissue engineering into a discipline with understood and predictable design principles, as is the case, for example, in mechanical or electrical engineering. To tackle this general problem we use techniques drawn from molecular biophysics, cell and developmental biology, and increasingly, computer science. Please check out our web page for details on specific problems, and email Alex for more details.