Speaker
Description
\emph{This is the keynote presentation for the 2025 Reinhart Heinrich Doctoral Thesis Award.}
Collective cell behaviours such as cell invasion and pattern formation emerge from interactions between individual cells, yet understanding how these local mechanisms scale to tissue-level dynamics remains a central challenge. In this talk, I will focus on two aspects of my thesis addressing how cell–cell interactions regulate proliferation and motility. First, I will discuss a continuum modelling and Bayesian inference framework for epithelial tissue expansion, showing how crowding constraints delay cell-cycle progression and generate spatial patterns of proliferation in growing tissues. Second, I will describe how adhesive interactions between cells can drive self-organisation, using a local continuum model derived from nonlocal adhesion principles to capture classical sorting behaviours such as segregation and engulfment.
