The Beller Group has been awarded a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the dynamics of active matter – matter that continually rearranges itself by consuming energy and producing internal forces. The project, titled "Geometries of Topological Defects in 3D Nematics, from Equilibrium Structure to Active Dynamics", will apply the physics of liquid crystals to understand order and disorder phenomena common to a wide range of soft matter and biophysical systems, including bacterial colonies and some eukaryotic cellular tissues. The Beller Group will collaborate with experimental and theoretical groups at UC Merced and other institutions to produce computationally-guided theoretical descriptions of these active materials. This work is funded by the NSF Division of Materials Research, grant number DMR-2046063.