Living organisms start their life with a single cell and partition itself into multiple cells by the process of cell division. Different chemical signals and gene regulatory networks establish identities of these cells as well as define their mechanical properties that organize them into a functional living organism. Standing on the expanding experimental knowledge of these processes and utilizing tools of statistical mechanics, reaction engineering, transport phenomena, and fluid mechanics we built computational models of these processes for fruit fly embryo that provided us quantiative understanding as well as predictive power about them.

The functioning of a living cell relies largely on structure and dynamics of biopolymers such as DNA, RNA, and proteins. In a complex environment like a cell, these polymers are subject to Brownian as well as active fluctuations. We utilize and adapt the physics of flexible polymer to reconstruct the structure of the polymers as well as infer the nature of these fluctuations from sparse imaging data.