Bacteria inhabit nearly every ecosystem, with critical implications for biogeochemistry, agriculture, and health. Many bacterial habitats are complex 3D environments, e.g., soils, hosts, and bodies of water, where they form spatially structured multicellular communities. This spatial organization is pivotal for community growth, cross-feeding, and diversity, and for withstanding challenges...
Biological tissues exhibit heterogeneity across multiple scales, from genetic to non-genetic. In epithelial layers, variability in mechanical properties such as adhesion and motility, together with differences in cellโcell interactions, strongly influences collective dynamics and tissue organization.
We present a 3D multiphase-field model \cite{monfared2025multiphase} of confluent cell...
The coexistence of diverse phenotypic traits within a population - such as variations in cell movement, growth, or signalling - can profoundly shape collective dynamics of cell populations. To capture these complexities, classical PDE models for cell migration can be extended to include phenotypic structuring, giving rise to a powerful class of non-local models: phenotype-structured partial...
Population models commonly use discrete structure classes to capture trait heterogeneity among individuals (e.g. age, size, phenotype, intracellular state). Upscaling these discrete models into continuum descriptions can improve analytical tractability and scalability of numerical solutions. Common upscaling approaches based solely on Taylor expansions may, however, introduce ambiguities in...
Cell invasion is a striking example of self-organisation in biology, playing a central role in development, regeneration, and disease. Classically, invasion is modelled by the FisherโKPP equation, which shows that the combination of cell proliferation and diffusion is sufficient to generate an invasive front whose speed is determined by the proliferation rate and cell diffusivity. When...
The control of gene expression by epigenetic factors, along with gene expression noise, results in a distribution of cell states amongst genetically identical cells. Previous studies have explored the role of gene expression in proliferation and vice versa, which, in turn, shapes cellular heterogeneity within a population. However, in these studies, the population was assumed to be well-mixed....
Cellular automaton models have long been used to study cellular processes, but may be challenging for incorporating heterogeneity, migratory, and high-density effects. In this work, we introduce an extension of the classic lattice-gas cellular automata, a framework which allows to consider changes in cell numbers, cellโcell interactions, migration, and evolution of genotypic and phenotypic...
In chase-and-run dynamics, two individuals interact in such a way that one moves towards the other (the chaser), while the other moves away (the runner). This behaviour can be observed in both interacting cells and animal populations. In this talk, I analyse the collective behaviours that emerge at the population level in heterogeneous groups consisting of subpopulations of chasers and runners...
Heterogeneity in cell behaviour plays a central role in the spatiotemporal organisation of cell populations, such as in the formation of bacterial biofilms, tissues, and tumour invasion. Mathematical modelling provides a framework for understanding how emergent collective behaviours arise from dynamic interactions within heterogeneous cell populations. The nature of this heterogeneity, as well...
