Physics of Life
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          • QMGR V
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          • The Physics of Evolution
          • Nanostructures at Soft Interfaces: Technology and Biophysics
          • Physics of Biological Oscillators
          • The Future of Optical Techniques in Biology
          • Tom McLeish's Durham farewell symposium
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          • Physics of Animal Health
          • Interdisciplinary Challenges in Non-Equilibrium Physics
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        • 2: Forces in Biology
        • 3: Life in Extreme Environments
        • 4: The Physics of Cancer
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        • 6: Pattern Formation and Morphogenesis
        • 7: Compartmentalisation & Confinement
        • 8: Physics of Bacterial Biofilms
        • 9: Cancer Sandpit
      • Summer/Winter schools >
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  • Useful Links
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  • Home
  • About
    • Meet the team
    • Our network
    • IoP Rosalind Franklin Medal
    • PoL SPF link
    • EDI policy
    • Privacy Notice
  • PoLNET3
    • Steering Group
    • Physics of Life Roadmap
    • Funding Opportunities >
      • EDI award
      • PoLNET PDRA Call 2023
    • Early Career Researchers
    • Events >
      • PoLNET3 Past Events >
        • Physics of Life 2025
        • Physics of Life PDRA Recipient Event
        • BBS Biennial Meeting 2024
        • Biofilaments Workshop 2024
        • Winter School: challenges and opportunities in Physics of Life
        • Non-equilibrium explorations on the physics of life : remembering the biological physics of Tom McLeish
        • NOTICE - Novel Optical Technology in Cardiac Electrophysiology
        • Physics of Life Summer School 2022
        • Motility in Microbes, Molecules and Matter 2
        • Tissue dynamics
        • Physics of Life: ECR bootcamp
        • Physics of Life 2023
        • Cutting-edge methods for bacterial pathogen interactions with host cells
        • Motility in Microbes, Molecules and Matter
        • Periodic patterns
        • Physics of Life ECR workshop
        • Physics of Life/iPoLS seminar
        • Biophysics and evolution
        • Launch
  • Physics of Medicine
    • Steering Group
    • Physics of Medicine Events >
      • Past Events >
        • Translational Ageing
        • Tackling drug resistance in cancer
        • Inflammatory Bowel Disease
        • Physics of Viruses
        • Antimicrobial Resistance
        • Metastasis Workshop
        • Neurodegenerative disease
        • Physics of Brains
  • POLNET 2
    • PoLNET2 team
    • Student Summer Bursaries 2019
    • Events >
      • PoLNET2 Past Events >
        • Sandpits
        • Past summer schools >
          • Summer School: Physics of Life Summer School: From Cells to Tissues and Organisms
          • Summer School: New approaches to Biomolecular function, structure and dynamics
        • Physics of Life Town Meetings >
          • Town Meeting 2019
          • Town Meeting 2018
          • Town Meeting 2017
        • Past Workshops >
          • QMGR V
          • Non-equilibrium Cold Plasmas in Biology and Medicine
          • The Fundamentals of Late Stage Cancer
          • The Physics of Evolution
          • Nanostructures at Soft Interfaces: Technology and Biophysics
          • Physics of Biological Oscillators
          • The Future of Optical Techniques in Biology
          • Tom McLeish's Durham farewell symposium
          • Multiscale mechanics in Biology
          • Epigenetics
          • Physics of Animal Health
          • Interdisciplinary Challenges in Non-Equilibrium Physics
          • Cancer Workshop
          • QMGR
          • Symmetry
          • Nanofluidics
          • Quantum Biology
          • Antimicrobial Resistance
          • Filaments and Cellular Responses
          • Biocomputation
          • Workshop Reports
  • PoLNET 1
    • PoLNET 1 Team
    • PoLNET1 Past Events >
      • Launch meeting 2013
      • Plenary Event 1: The Living Cell
      • Plenary Event 2: Synthetic Biology
      • Plenary Event 3: Multicellularity
      • Focussed Workshops >
        • 1: The Physics of Bacterial Infection
        • 2: Forces in Biology
        • 3: Life in Extreme Environments
        • 4: The Physics of Cancer
        • 5: Information Flow in Biological Systems
        • 6: Pattern Formation and Morphogenesis
        • 7: Compartmentalisation & Confinement
        • 8: Physics of Bacterial Biofilms
        • 9: Cancer Sandpit
      • Summer/Winter schools >
        • Summer School
        • Winter School
      • Final Summit
    • Roadmap for Biological Physics
  • Useful Links
  • Contact us

Plenary Event 3: Multicellularity

8-9 January 2014
St Catherine’s College, Oxford
Understanding cooperative interactions in large ensembles of cells necessitates integration between different scales. Examples of such phenomena include the capacity of the same genotype to differentiate into many different phenotypes depending on environmental factors; quorum sensing where a colony of cells send chemical signals to each other that lead to modified patterns of gene expression in all of the them in a collective way, thereby preparing them for a new collective mode of action; and the “social” aspects of life in bacterial biofilms that allow them to make the colony more resilient, and for example more resistant to antibiotics. The extensive knowledge gained from studying the statistical physics of interacting systems that undergo phase transitions, albeit using simplified models, puts physicists in a unique position to help understand the collective properties of living cells.

Who should attend?

We invite particiption by academic staff from physical and life science departments in the UK who are interested in the central goal of the Network. We are particularly keen to encourage participation by clinicians and industrial scientists, to foster the development of relationships with end-users of the research.

Purpose

Our Focussed Workshops will provide a mechanism to nucleate new collaborative partnerships that wil lead to outstanding science and the award of grants by research councils. One of the central goals of the Plenary Events will be to prepare the ground for those Workshops and to help us build a programme for understanding the physics of life. Discussion sessions will be a very important element of the events, and it is hoped that all attendees will come ready to engage fully in that element of the programme.

Programme

Day 1
12:30
Lunch
1:30
Introduction
13:45
Herbert Levine (Rice): “Collective Cell Motion during Wound Healing”
14:25
Jacques Prost (ESPCI): “Reflections about Active Systems”
15:05
Discussion
15:30
Coffee
15:50
Breakout 1
16:50
Report back
17:10
Ottoline Leyser (Cambridge): “How Useful are Numbers?”
18:30
Dinner
20:00
Bela Novak (Oxford): “Cycling Down the Road to Multicellularity”
Day 2
09:00
Joe Howard (MPI-CBG): “Microtubules and Morphology”
09:40
Wilson Poon (Edinburgh): “Bacterial Colonies as Active Soft Matter”
10:20
Discussion
10:45
Coffee
11:00
Breakout 2
12:00
Report back
12:15
Dennis Bray (Cambridge): “Limits of Computational Biology: From Bacteria to Brains”
13:00
Lunch and Close

Registration

The registration fee includes lunch on both days and dinner, bed and breakfast for the night of January 8. Register on line.

Directions

The meeting will take place at St. Catherine’s College, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UJ. Maps and directions are available on the College’s web site (https://www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/contact/map-and-directions).

Funded by:                                                                                                 Managed bY:

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