We are very happy to announce that on Friday Sept 26th, Luc has successfully defended hi Ph.D. thesis and is henceforth known as Dr. Zorrilla 🙂 The thesis panel, with Helene de Maleprade, Vasily Kantsler and Jorge Arrieta, recognised his great work by awarding him a cum laude. Congratulations Luc!

This September we’re delighted to be hosting Orkun Soyer, Professor at the School of Life Sciences of the University of Warwick, collaborating on a project which aims to sample wild species of freshwater cyanobacteria in Mallorca (…yes, there are fresh water bodies in Mallorca!). His stay is financed through a Visiting Fellowship from the University of the Balearic Islands (kudos!). Looking forward to what will come out of this!

It’s a long time since our last post… mea culpa for neglecting the thread. …but we haven’t been idle! In this period we have been awarded a new grant to look at the stochastic dynamics of the flagellar tip (currently searching for a 2Y postdoc, btw!), together with Idan Tuval we have hosted Henry Fu (U. Utah) for a 6-months mini sabbatical, we are finalising a few papers (cargo transport, active-passive systems, Micromonas motility, etc.) and have hosted our first undergrads from the Physics Department of UIB (Ana Maya Sevilla, Jorge Pottiez and Cristina Martí). Meeting-wise, amongst other things the 2023 ASLO meeting took place in Palma in June. Marco gave an invited talk in the session “From Single Cells to Ecosystems Scales” (org. Soeren Ahmerkamp, Lars Berendt, Klaus Koren) and organised, together with Soeren, a hybrid mini workshop on the same theme at IMEDEA. We’re happy to have had people attending (and speaking) from California all the way to Australia. On the outreach side, within the EU Project Ocean Night, we have been directly involved with a lovely night at the Cafe Tres Bandas in Palma (co-organised with Pint of Science), and have organised a visit of high-school science teachers to one of the poster sessions of ASLO 2023.

After a quick break in August, we look forward to new and exciting news for the next academic year! Together with Sara, we’re heading to Philippe Bastin’s lab at Inst. Pasteur to look at Micromonas flagella. This might lead to a new collaboration with Philippe and Raphaël Jeanneret. In Oct-Nov we will be hosting Ashis Mukhopadhyay (Wayne St. Univ., Detroit, USA), partially supported by a Visiting Professor Scholarship from the UIB. Finally, we are exploring a potential collaboration on biophysical aspects of viral infections of microorganisms… more info on this if/when it will take shape!

Thrilling news! On Friday Steve has successfully defended his PhD thesis! Dr. Williams, as he’s now known, endured 3h of grilling by Giorgio Volpe (UCL) and Gareth Alexander (U Warwick)… and managed to emerge reasonably unscathed 😉 Steve has gracefully agreed to keep working with us as a postdoc for the next few months. Thanks Steve!

We’re very happy to announce that Iago has been awarded the Faculty Thesis Prize from Warwick Medical School, for his thesis “Biophysical mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance in swarming B. subtilis“. The thesis was co-supervised with our good friend Munehiro Asally. Well done Iago! You can read more about Iago’s work in his eLife publication and (hopefully soon) in a second follow-up article.

Iago is currently a postdoc in the Oxford Colloids Group (U. Oxford, UK).

We are very excited to welcome Shilpa Khatri, Assistant Professor at UC Merced (USA), who’s joined us at IMEDEA about 10 days ago for a 2-months visit. This is funded from a Visiting Fellowship from the University of the Balearic Islands. Between short trips to the continent and co-organising with us and others the 2022 MOB meeting, Shilpa will work with Steve Williams on a numerical project about phototaxis.

Over the last three weeks we were lucky enough to host Eleonora Secchi (ETH Zürich). Her visit was supported by a Visiting Fellowship from UIB (calls every 6 months: drop an email if interested!). We had lots of fun working on biofilm streamers by marine bacteria and in general exchanging ideas and learning from each other. Have a good fly back Eleonora and talk soon!

I am absolutely delighted to share the news that, together with Irene Stefanini (U. Torino), Daniel Segrè (Boston Uni) and Elizabeth New (U. Sydney), we have been awarded a grant from the Human Frontiers Science Program to work on the biophysics of yeast mating. This is a very intriguing subject involving mechanical stresses, metabolism, mixing flows and…. (surprisingly) the gut of wasps! In our group, this grant will finance a postdoctoral position and a lab technician with a starting date of 1st of Nov. (Ads coming out soon)

We’re delighted to share the news that Eleonora Secchi (ETH Zürich) has won a Visiting Fellowship from UIB to come and visit us at IMEDEA for the month of September 2021 (COVID permitting!). Eleonora is the head of the bioMatter Microfluidics Lab at ETH. She is a truly excellent scientist and we’re very excited to have the opportunity to host her here!