Zwicker Group

Another pre-print from our group see's the light of day! 🎉 This time we how the coarsening of droplets is affected by advection and reactions: arxiv.org/abs/2510.00827 @stefankoestler2025.bsky.social describes our surprising findings in the thread below ⤵️

Our latest work from a stimulating collaboration with @jerelleaj.bsky.social and @nathanieldhess.bsky.social is out now!

A great example of a totally unplanned discovery in our group, spearheaded by a Bachelor and a PhD student! Curiosity wins 🥳

New preprint 🎉
What began as Frieder Johannsen’s bachelor thesis in the @zwickergroup.bsky.social (which I had the pleasure to supervise) evolved into our latest paper: “Chemically Active Liquid Bridges Generate Repulsive Forces” — unlike passive ones, which attract.
📄 arxiv.org/abs/2509.18777

It was fun to do a little interview and think about the relevance of our work for a more experimental and engineering inclined community.

We have developed a new workflow to map whole human organs at single-cell resolution, while integrating spatial transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics.

We applied this workflow to map precancerous lesions of the fallopian tubes.

More here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In other news, we welcome Mengmeng Wu 🇨🇳 and Lukas Kristensen 🇩🇰 to our group! 🥳 Mengmeng is a postdoc who will combine particle-based simulations with analytical theory to study chemically active droplets. Lukas visits us for three months and will work on anchored active droplets. Welcome aboard! 🎉

Marcel developed and analyzed a generalized coarsening model to explain chromosomal crossover placements during meiosis (arxiv.org/abs/2509.09521). This model provides a coherent explanation of experimental data across mutants and species!

Cathelijne discovered that the energy required to maintain Turing patterns can be reduced substantially if the involved molecules repel each other (arxiv.org/abs/2509.05093). This work permits a thermodynamic analysis of this classical reaction-diffusion system!

Oliver looked at the dynamics of phase separation in elastic networks, where non-local effects arrest coarsening and lead to patterns with a well-defined length scale (arxiv.org/abs/2508.09829). These patterns can be realized experimentally to make materials with interesting optical properties!

Yicheng discovered that driven chemical reactions between solvent components can induce a pressure difference at interfaces (arxiv.org/abs/2508.09816). This can lead to fun effects, including self-propulsion, and showcases the surprising versatility of chemically active emulsions.

We were exceptionally effective at finishing manuscripts in the last weeks and couldn't keep up with describing pre-prints here. This thread summarizes the main results of our recent works:

This is a great opportunity to start an independent group in one of the best research environments you could think of!

Interested in doing a PhD in my group? I have an opening for a PhD student to work on understanding and designing nanomedicine-membrane interactions! Apply here:
careers.universiteitleiden.nl/job/Leiden-P...

Looking forward to discussing our little active droplet theories with students!

Congratulations, Anna!

Congratulations! This is very well deserved

Join my team for a PhD in Learning in living adaptive networks (Theory). Apply by October 7th through www.portal.graduatecenter.lmu.de/ocgc/qmb

It was a lot of fun to write this little piece on using phase transitions to process cellular information! We probably pose more questions than we give answers, but that’s exciting.

That’s a super cool story!

Our institute turned 100 years today! We had a fantastic celebration with scientific talks by Howard Stone and Christina Marchetti. 🎉

This workshop was just exceptional! Thanks to everyone for making it such a success

Took us until the end of Week 5 to take a group picture 🤦‍♀️, so we're missing a number of key participants. But what a wonderful group of thoughtful and creative people to talk science with! Thanks for joining us at #KITP! 🤓

Glad to see our paper out in press! The long delay to publication emphasizes the role of pre-prints, and I'm happy that people were able to read about our ideas years before they appear in a journal.

It's sad that our conference on biomolecular condensates is already over. On the flip side, you can watch almost all talks online to relive the stimulating vibe! Thanks again to all speakers for delivering clear talks, and to the audience for asking great questions!

Our conference bringing together theorists and experimentalists to discuss biomolecular condensates started today! Looking forward to three intensive days of stimulating discussion.

@jerelleaj.bsky.social, master painter 👩🏽‍🎨 of the blackboard 👩🏽‍🏫, in action! 🤩 She is amazing at capturing the essence of our complex, meandering (and sometimes contentious) discussions @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social

This was an excellent blackboard presentation of the physics of condensates!

Shura Grosberg (NYU) gives a fantastic blackboard talk @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social on liquid-liquid phase separation in and out of equilibrium 👨‍🏫

It’s been a lot of fun talking about chemically active condensates to such an attentive and motivated crowd!