I am a theoretical physicist working on biological and soft matter physics at the University of California, Merced since September, 2018. I am working on  a variety of problems on biological active matter and mechanobiology, with a focus on how active mechanical forces lead to self-organization of living matter across spatial scales from subcellular to multicellular.  Please see here for a detailed biosketch (updated 2023).

Before joining UC Merced, I was at the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago  as a postdoctoral scholar in the Vaikuntanathan group.   My prior postdoctoral work at the Weizmann Institute with Prof. Samuel Safran explained a link between the structural order and beating of heart muscle cells and showed theoretically how mechano-chemical processes may govern cellular development in a controlled manner. I obtained a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Florida in 2012 working on  low temperature phases of matter.