Other Seminars Sonia Contera

22/06/202612:00CHARLES DARWINOther SeminarsSonia ConteraProfessor of Biological Physics and Associate Head of the Department of Physics for EDI, University of Oxford"Quantitative Biology in the Analog: Cell Mechanics from Plant Morphogenesis to Brain Thermodynamics"Abstract:I am a biological physicist working at the interface of physics, biology, and information science. My academic training and research career have spanned multiple scientific and cultural environments, including Madrid, Moscow, Beijing, Prague, Osaka, Aarhus , and Oxford. This trajectory has shaped an interdisciplinary approach to science grounded in both physical principles and biological complexity.
My research originated in nanotechnology, where I developed scanning probe microscopy techniques to probe matter at the nanoscale. This naturally led to the study of biological systems, as the nanometre scale is where the molecular machinery of life operates. At these scales, mechanical, chemical, and electrical interactions are intrinsically coupled, giving rise to structures such as proteins that integrate mechanics with analogue and digital information processing.
This perspective has led me to investigate biological systems as non-equilibrium physical systems, in which energy dissipation, fluctuations, and active processes govern function and organisation. In this talk, I will present our work on plant growth and morphogenesis, focusing on how spatiotemporal variations in mechanical properties regulate shape formation. I will also discuss recent experiments on neurons, where we study the coupling between cytoskeletal mechanics and electrical activity underlying action potential generation.
Finally, I will introduce a novel multimodal neural interface that enables simultaneous measurements of nanoscale mechanical vibrations and the emergence and synchronisation of action potentials in neuronal networks. These approaches aim to provide a unified physical description of biological function across scales.