Welcome to Yilin Wu Lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Life is a fascinating, far-from-equilibrium state of matter. The research in our lab lies at the interface of physics and biology: We seek to understand how living systems function, adapt and evolve. Microbes are the dominant form of life on our planet. As the key players of life-Earth co-evolution and with relatively simple structure, function and behavior, microbes provide tractable systems to study the physical principles that govern living matter. Our current research is focused on the motion and self-organization of microbial systems in space and time. The systems of choice range from single cells to microbial communities, such as bacterial swarms and biofilms. Specifically, we study:
- Collective motion and self-organization in multicellular systems;
- Long-range communication and material transport in multicellular systems;
- Bacterial motility in complex fluids;
- Growth dynamics of general living matter;
We hope knowledge learned from our research will fuel the development of non-equilibrium physics (e.g. self-organization of general active matter) and will guide the engineering of novel materials that self-assemble, self-renew and are stimulus-responsive. Our research is mainly driven by experiments, with the aid of modeling and computer simulations. We fuse experimental techniques from biophotonics, materials engineering and molecular biology to address different questions.
More descriptions of our current research projects can be found in Research.
We like to collect amazing Pictures and Movies of the microbial world. Hopefully visitors to our website will enjoy them as much as we do.
Physics of Living Systems
From Single Cell to Communities
