About me

I am a Junior Research Group Leader at the ZMBP of Tübingen (Germany) where I lead the Biomechanical Modeling of Morphogenesis Lab.
My research focuses on understanding morphogenesis, biomechanics and their interaction in living systems, mostly plants. I use computational tools, mostly based on FEM implementation of continuum mechanics problems, to understand how plants (but sometimes also animal systems) 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.


 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 or visit my group webpage: Biomechanical Modeling of Morphogenesis at the ZMBP (University of Tübingen)