Parallel Session Descriptions
Biomolecular Assemblies and Condensates
Biomolecular assemblies and condensates are an important and rapidly developing area of Physics of Life research. From membrane-less organelles and transcriptional hubs to cytoskeletal structures, viral factories and bacterial aggresomes, biological function can emerge from the collective organisation of molecules across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This session will showcase advances in understanding how these assemblies form, maintain structure, respond to environmental cues and perform biological functions. It will highlight how quantitative experiments, theoretical frameworks and computational models can reveal the physical principles governing their behaviour, with particular emphasis on how molecular-scale interactions generate emergent material properties and how these properties, in turn, regulate biological function.
Collective Phenomena in Living Matter: From Microswimmers to Animals
This session explores how collective behaviour emerges across living systems, from microscopic swimmers such as bacteria and algae to larger organisms including insects, fish, birds, and mammals. It will examine the physical principles that allow many interacting individuals to generate coherent motion, dynamic patterns, and collective decisions without central control. Topics may include swarming, flocking, schooling, active turbulence, biological transport, and the formation of structured colonies and tissues. Particular emphasis will be placed on the interplay between local interactions, hydrodynamics, sensing, environmental cues, and fluctuations in driving self-organisation far from equilibrium. By bringing together perspectives across scales, the session aims to identify common mechanisms linking microswimmer suspensions, cellular assemblies, and animal groups.
Emerging Areas in the Physics
of Life
Engineering Biology
Engineering Biology is transforming our ability to understand, manipulate, and design living systems. By integrating biology with engineering, physics, chemistry, computation, and data science, the field provides new approaches for investigating the principles of life and creating novel biological functions. This session will bring together researchers working across disciplines to explore emerging concepts, methods, and technologies in Engineering Biology. Topics will include engineering cellular processes and functions, biohybrid and living materials, artificial cells, engineering biological communities, and others.
Evolution, Ecology and Epidemiology
This session highlights contributions from physics to our understanding to population dynamics, including ecology, evolution and epidemiology. Theoretical, computational and experimental works are all welcome.
Gene Regulatory Dynamics in Natural and Synthetic Systems
This session will explore how dynamic gene regulation generates robust and adaptable biological behaviour across natural and synthetic systems. We will consider how cells sense and process changing signals, how gene regulatory networks encode temporal information, and how quantitative measurements and modelling can reveal the principles underlying these dynamics. The session will span natural developmental and cellular systems as well as synthetic approaches that allow regulatory mechanisms to be reconstructed, perturbed and tested. By bringing together work across scales and organisms, we aim to highlight common design principles governing dynamic gene expression and how these can be used to understand, predict and engineer biological behaviour.
Imaging and Single Molecule Biology
Imaging and single-molecule methods are essential tools for investigating the physics of life. For decades, biological processes were hidden behind the curtain of ensemble averages, masking the dynamic heterogeneity of life. Today, revolutionary advances in optical physics and structural biology allow us to watch life unfold—one molecule at a time. This session explores the frontier of high-resolution imaging and single-molecule biophysics, highlighting how physical principles are leveraged to observe, manipulate, and quantify biological systems at unprecedented scales. These physical principals span optics, photonics, electromagnetism, acoustics and quantum and are underpinned by advances in computation and AI. This sessions aim is to bring together those working at the forefront of instrument development and those using existing instruments in novel ways or pushing them to their limits.
Immunity, Resistance and Host/Pathogen Dynamics
Metabolism, Growth and Physical Bioenergetics
Living systems use energy to sustain growth, maintenance, and active processes essential for life. They continuously transform matter and energy through the complex biochemical reactions that constitute metabolism, making them intrinsically active systems operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Understanding how physical principles govern these processes is central to uncovering the mechanisms that regulate biological function across scales. Contributions are invited on topics including the bioenergetics of cellular processes and whole organisms, metabolic network dynamics, energy conversion and resource allocation, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, stochastic effects and control in metabolism, and the physical constraints underlying growth and adaptation. Experimental, theoretical, and computational studies are all welcome, spanning molecular, cellular, multicellular, and ecological systems.
Microbes Across Length Scales
This session will deal with all aspects of the physics of microorganisms, from single molecules to biofilms and motility. Single celled organisms can provide tractable and accessible insights into how life works, maintaining the essential complexity but with the opportunity to control and manipulate that
leads more straightforwardly to quantitative insights. The session welcomes contributions from both experimental and theoretically focused researchers.
Patterns and Waves
Pattern formation and wave propagation are fundamental organising principles in biological systems,
operating across scales from molecules to tissues and whole organisms. This session will explore how patterns and waves emerge, propagate, and shape biological function through biochemical signalling, gene regulation, physical interactions, and collective behaviour. Examples range from cell fate patterning during embryonic development to calcium and intracellular signalling waves, bioelectrical dynamics, and tissue-scale mechanical waves during morphogenesis and wound healing. This session aims to bring together experimental and theoretical approaches to explore shared physical principles underlying pattern formation, wave propagation, and dynamic organisation across living systems.
Physics of Disease
Disease emerges when biological systems are disrupted across molecular, cellular and tissue scales. The Physics of Disease session will showcase how physical principles, quantitative measurement and predictive modelling can uncover mechanisms of pathology and guide new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. The session will explore how forces, material properties, molecular organisation and collective cell behaviour shape disease initiation, progression and treatment response. This session will emphasise the value of interdisciplinary approaches for translating fundamental biophysical insight into clinically relevant innovation. Contributions using experiment, theory, computation or technology development are welcomed across diverse disease settings and all stages of translation.
Protein Structure, Dynamics and Interactions
Proteins are molecular machines whose biological function emerges from three-dimensional architecture, continuous motion, and selective binding to partners. This session explores how physical principles-thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, electrostatics, and polymer physics-shape folding pathways, conformational ensembles, and interaction networks from atoms to cells. By linking measurable structure and dynamics to mechanism, this session aims to bridge biophysics with systems-level physiology. It is intended for researchers studying folding, enzyme catalysis, signalling, phase separation, and drug design who seek a unified physical picture of how structure, motion, and molecular recognition jointly enable life.
Quantum Technology in and for Biology
This session marks the debut of quantum technology at the Physics of Life meeting. Recent breakthroughs are moving quantum tools out of physics labs and into real-world biology. Key advances include room-temperature quantum sensing to measure intracellular temperature via electron spins, and using quantum light (such as entangled or squeezed photons) to image delicate biological tissues without causing phototoxicity. We aim to bridge the gap between disciplines and invite: experimental and theoretical quantum physicists and technologists developing next-generation hardware and models; biologists and biophysicists looking for powerful, non-invasive imaging tools; and biochemists and computational modelers studying proteins that exhibit natural quantum behaviours for bio-hybrid applications. Whether you develop quantum systems or want to deploy them to solve meaningful biological questions, join us to spark vital new collaborations at this emerging frontier.
The Company of Biologists Session: Cell Architecture and Forces
Cells build, maintain, and remodel their architecture through the dynamic interplay among molecular organisation, mechanical forces, and signalling. This session will explore how cytoskeletal networks, adhesion systems, membranes and organelles generate, transmit and respond to forces to control cell shape, migration, polarity, division and tissue organisation. Bringing together perspectives from cell biology, biophysics, mechanobiology and quantitative imaging, the session will highlight how physical principles shape cellular structure and function across scales. The session will showcase emerging approaches to understanding how cells integrate biochemical and mechanical information in complex microenvironments.
The
Company of Biologists Session: Differentiation and Development
How a complex multicellular organism develops from a single cell or an early embryo is a fundamental question in the physics of life. This session will examine how cells self-organise in space and time to acquire distinct fates, form patterns, and build robust tissue structures. We welcome contributions investigating how cells sense, generate, and respond to mechanical, chemical, genetic, and geometrical cues, and how these signals integrate across scales to drive reproducible outcomes. The session highlights interdisciplinary approaches spanning quantitative experiments, live imaging, theory, and computational methods. We seek to address how developmental robustness emerges despite intrinsic stochasticity, and how physical mechanisms shape tissue and organism formation.
The
Company of Biologists Session: Physics of the Nucleus
The cell nucleus is a dynamic biophysical system in which genome organisation, transcription, and chromatin architecture emerge from the interplay of molecular interactions, mechanics, and self-organisation. This session will explore how physical principles shape nuclear structure and function across multiple scales, from local chromatin dynamics to large-scale genome organisation. Topics include the role of nuclear architecture in regulating gene expression, the formation and maintenance of chromatin domains, and how mechanical and biophysical processes influence genome function. Combining quantitative experiments, advanced imaging, genomics, and computational modelling, speakers will highlight how a physics-based perspective is providing new insights into nuclear organisation and its impact on cellular behaviour. The session aims to bring together researchers from physics and biology to discuss emerging concepts and approaches for understanding the nucleus as a complex and dynamic physical system.
Tissue Growth, Mechanics and Mechanosensing
That physical forces and mechanics are central to tissue growth and development is by now well established. This has been discovered through the bringing together of techniques across a range of disciplines: developmental and cell biology, cancer biology, physics, bioengineering, computer science and mathematics. Significantly, this research has also pioneered the integration of theory and experiment. This session will welcome researchers working across disciplines exploring how the mechanical environment and cell-generated forces impact cell and tissue function and growth.