All multicellular organisms share a universal biophysical trait: they are composed of individual cells that move and adhere to one another. Similar to residents in an apartment building, cells exist within a highly social microenvironment, constrained by physical barriers. Cells must generate and regulate forces in order to interact and bind. While tremendous efforts have been made to determine the biochemical rules governing multicellularity, the dynamics of biological forces remain incomplete, limiting the translation of this knowledge into modern 3D biomanufacturing technologies.

Our team aims to comprehensively understand how fluid forces control and regulate multicellularity to form living tissue. Through innovative experimental approaches, including computational modeling, 4D volumetric imaging, and multi-scale photolithography, we aim to define the fluidic force laws that govern cell-to-tissue organization. 

Our desire to discover new biophysical properties of cells and tissue is also achieved through novel tool building. Over the past decade, our team has focused on developing innovative live cell imaging and microfluidic tools; called Spatial Adaptive Imaging and Lithography (SAIL). These tools are designed to quantitatively analyze cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions under various extracellular stimuli, including fluid forces, surface adhesion factors, and 3D topologies. Our research has revealed key biophysical mechanisms that drive cell adhesion and aggregation under fluid pressure. Moving forward, we aim to expand the application of our tools and techniques to engineer biological tissue substitutes on a larger scale.

Our cross-disciplinary tool building (Optics, Biofluidic, Computing) has resulted several industry-ready platform technologies that are being commercialised by Ability Optics Pty Ltd. Currently, we are developing integrated imaging bioreactors that can monitor and produce 3D micro-Avatars of Tissues (MAT) at scale. Other interests include developing optical tweezers for single-molecule force spectroscopy and pioneering new methods in volumetric imaging from molecular to whole animals scales.