Mark Bowick, Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Visiting Distinguished Professor of Physics, UC Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1983, followed by three years as Research Associate in the Particle Theory Group at Yale. Subsequently he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the Physics Department at Syracuse University where he held an Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the Department of Energy from 1987-1994. He was director of the Soft Matter Program at Syracuse from 2011 – 2016 when he joined the Kavli Institute at UC Santa Barbara.
He received the First prize award in the 1986 Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004, received the Syracuse Chancellor’s Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement in 2006, and the William Wasserstrom Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Advising in 2009. This year, 2023, he was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
His career has been split between high energy theoretical physics and condensed matter physics. Current research interests include the interplay of order and geometry, topological defects, active nematics, membrane statistical mechanics, and biological development.
IFT Seminar
October 3,
5:15pm, 2205 NPB (pizza)
“The hard science of soft matter”
Seminar for postdocs, grads, and undergrads.
IFT Colloquium
October 4, 2023
2:00pm 2205 NPB
“The Role of Orientational Order in Biological Development”
Morphogenesis, the process through which genes generate form, establishes tissue scale order as a template for constructing the complex shapes of the body plan. The extensive growth required to build these ordered substrates is fueled by cell proliferation, which, naively, should disrupt order. Understanding how active morphogenetic mechanisms couple cellular and mechanical processes to generate order remains an outstanding question in animal development. I will review the statistical mechanics of orientational order and discuss the observation of a fourfold orientationally ordered phase (tetratic) in the model organism Parhyale hawaiensis. I will also discuss theoretical mechanisms for the formation of orientational order that require both motility and cell division, with support from self-propelled vertex models of tissue. The aim is to uncover a robust, active mechanism for generating global orientational order in a non-equilibrium system that then sets the stage for the development of shape and form.
(Nature Physics 2023 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02025-3)
An introductory talk for undergrads/beginning grad students on “Fragile Objects: The Hard Science of Soft Matter”