About me

I am a postdoc in the Plant Morphodynamics Research Unit (www.plantmorphodynamics.com), a consortium of German research groups working on quantitative plant morphodynamics. I use computational tools, mostly based on FEM implementation of continuum mechanics problems, to understand how plants grow, combining genetic signaling with cell wall mechanics. 


I have developed in collaboration with Richard Smith group a user friendly software, MorphoMechanX, to model plant biomechanics and growth.

Previously I worked on plant ovule development in Celia Baroux group at the University of Zürich.
 
My background is in physics, and this characterises my approach to biomechanics.

 


Here we can see an example of inflation on a portion of sepal tissue of A. thaliana (provided by Aleksandra Sapala) where we acted interactively on the template by removing some cells as to simulate an ablation process. After the inflation we display the trace of the Cauchy stress and its principal directions.

To know more about  my current research and the FEM software MorphoMechanX, go to the section Research.