While our genomes provide a blueprint for life, the everyday function of our cells and bodies depends on self-organization—dynamic mechanisms where molecules and cells coordinate to build tissues or fight disease. My lab seeks to understand how to read and write this untapped programming language of cell biology, unlocking new therapeutic modalities and paradigms for cell engineering. I will share our recent progress in the development of programmable reaction-diffusion systems for spatiotemporal circuit design. By repurposing positioning systems from bacteria as synthetic spatiotemporal signaling nodes in eukaryotes, we can genetically encode an unprecedented range of self-organizing protein patterns, dynamics and waves in diverse cell types, primary neurons, stem cells, and animals. These synthetic protein waves can be used in a “read” mode, acting as a biochemical carrier signal in engineered "cellular radio" circuits for real-time FM streaming of dynamic sub-cellular states and data; or in a “write” mode, altering the spatiotemporal organization of activity to probe critical but difficult to query constraints on function. Continued development of these and other synthetic strategies will expand our ability to understand and engineer the self-organizing circuitry that powers dynamic living systems.

Living systems operate far from equilibrium, continuously consuming energy to generate motion, forces, and information flow across scales. This activity breaks time-reversal symmetry, producing collective dynamics that cannot be understood as relaxation toward equilibrium. In this talk, I will show how broken symmetries can be identified and quantified in living matter, focusing on fluctuations, probability currents, and collective organization. I will argue that irreversibility is not merely a signature of biological activity, but a functional feature that stabilizes organization and constrains dynamics. By retaining time-directionality in descriptions of collective dynamics across scales, we uncover nonequilibrium attractors and control directions, with examples spanning intracellular dynamics, active materials, and the emergence of multicellularity.

Replaced by Center for Living Systems student-organized special lecture.

Replaced by Center for Living Systems student-organized special lecture.