Last week the 39th Marian Smoluchowski Symposium on Statistical Physics took place at the Scientific Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Rome, one of the oldest Polish research institutions abroad. The talks covered anomalous diffusion, fractional dynamics, rare events,
complex networks, information theory and biological systems. We co-organised the event and presented two posters. Looking forward to the next year’s 40th edition of MSS!
Earlier this month Salar attended the PhysCell2026 conference in Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands. The meeting brought together diverse perspectives on the physics of cells, including cellular and tissue mechanics, collective behavior, and tissue dynamics. He presented the latest results as a poster about tissue fluidization and multicellular pattern formation as consequences of introducing curvature term in a classic vertex model.
In the last SONATA call by NCN Szymon received a standalone grant for investigating large-scale dynamics and phase transitions in models of confluent soft matter. Szymon will form a research group at the Department of Medical Physics and Biophysics Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Sciences, AGH University of Krakow. For more details check Szymon’s webpage: https://szymonstarzonek.com/. Huge congratulations!
Pablo Vidal-Franco receives the 2025 Early Career Scientist Award winners for the Journal of Veterinary Behavior! The award was granted for his “remarkable and detailed paper about 2-dimensional vocal space in cats when they are isolated”, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2025.04.009. As the Editor-in-Chief notes the paper supports “the mandate of the Journal of Veterinary Behavior to provide a home for the best science in veterinary behavioral medicine and veterinary behavior in a way that promotes our understanding of the species we study and their welfare”. Congratulations!
Last week Pablo attended NEURONUS & Young PTBUN 2026 Neuroscience Forum in Krakow, which featured a variety of interesting talks covering diverse areas of neurobiology. The topic ranged from treatment of nervous system disorders, through image analysis and data integration, to regulatory mechanisms underlying brain function, cognition and perception. Pablo’s top pick covered neural learning principles in simple model organism Hydra. Pablo presented a poster about Pong-capable network motifs under increasing cognitive load, and received valuable feedback regarding how to approach experimental validation of his predictions.
In the last couple of days Thomas Sokolowski from FIAS, Germany, was with a short research visit at our group. We had plenty of discussions on ongoing projects. On Monday Thomas gave a joint physics-biology seminar at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology (MCB) about synergizing optimization, inference and AI for parametrizing spatial-stochastic biochemical systems in embryogenesis under low data availability.
Our joined work with @Winata Lab on the development of trabeculae in zebrafish heart is at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.12.705356v1. We performed spatial analysis of ventricular myocardium and trabecular cardiomyocytes across conditions showing that metabolically more active cardiomyocytes shift with respect to the heart’s wall forming protrusions that then connect to complex structure. The uncovered link between metabolic activity pre-patterning and the emerging structure might be relevant to a broad range of developing organs.
Today at 12:15, room 1016, Helder will present his work on spatiotemporal aspects of Turing patterns at the Math and Computer Science Faculty of Jagiellonian University. We expect lot of insightful comments. Everyone is welcome to join!
Recently Salar and Szymon participated in the ‘Coarse-Graining Tissue Mechanics 2025’ conference, held in Ljubljana from September 15-21, 2025. They presented two posters: ‘Cellular curvature as a mechanical regulator of tissue morphogenesis’ and ‘Spatiotemporal signatures of phase transition in vertex model’. The presentations triggered fruitful discussions with fellow researchers, providing valuable feedback. The conference agenda was rich with insightful talks offering a clear perspective on the current trends in modelling of biological tissues.
Last week we participated in the 38th Marian Smoluchowski Symposium. It was great opportunity to present our research on pattern formation during development. Overall as a group we had two talks and three posters. We got a lot of useful feedback. We are already looking forward to the 39th edition of the MSS!
