Manasvi Sahu is a Postgraduate researcher in the Department of Physics, King’s College London.

He finished his masters in physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where his projects involved understanding the effect of boundary conditions of active systems via simulation of continuum models and developing a hybrid Cahn-Hilliard Keller Segel model for chemically active Biological systems.

Before his masters degree, Manasvi worked as a research assistant for an year, where he worked on image processing and data analysis of liquid crystals at different parameters. As a part of his bachelor's thesis, he worked on statistical analysis of Individual mosquito flights.

Research interests

• Computational Biophysics
• Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
• Emergent phenomena

Biological systems are made up of tiny constituents (cells, subcellular systems, etc). The collective dynamics of these systems, governed by their chemical and mechanical properties, gives rise to emergent phenomena, such as cell division, food hunting etc. Computational biophysics attempts to develop models which can explain the emergence of such phenomena from the collective dynamics.

Thesis abstract

Living cells are among the most striking examples of active, non-equilibrium matter. Their supporting scaffold, the actin cortex, is a buzzing network of filaments that constantly rearranges itself and reshapes the cell membrane. While we understand how individual filaments grow, shrink, branch or break at the molecular scale, it is unclear how these processes combine to shape a whole cell. The key challenge is to bridge this gap. In this PhD, we will identify which simple molecular ingredients are necessary to generate large-scale organisation, and which patterns of activity provide the most robust strategies for growing structures under thermal and active noise.

Primary Supervisor: Ivan Palaia

Secondary Supervisor: Matthias Krause