CAREER: Tissues as Adaptive Materials: Investigating the Role of Cellular Adaptability in Tissue Mechanics

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research studying living tissues as new types of adaptive materials. Unlike traditional materials, living tissues are made of responsive and adaptive cells. They can change their structure or coordinate their movements in response to mechanical or chemical signals.

These abilities make living tissues dynamic and flexible. They also lead to complex mechanical transitions in processes like wound healing, embryonic development, and cancer invasion. This project will investigate how cellular adaptive responses to the environment influence the larger-scale behavior of tissues.

It will create a link between cellular biology and material properties, providing insights into treating related diseases. Moreover, this connection can advance the understanding of living materials and inspire the design of new materials to replace damaged tissues. The PI’s educational and outreach activities aim to foster interdisciplinary studies between fields like physics, biology, and materials science, and broaden the views of the next generation of scientists.

This research project investigates the mechanics of living tissues as adaptive materials by incorporating cellular adaptability into shape-based tissue models. Cellular adaptability, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions and coordinated cell movements, is a key factor distinguishing living tissues from traditional soft materials. The research will explore how these adaptive behaviors influence phenomena like jamming and glass transitions, rheological responses, and emergent instabilities on the tissue level.

The findings are expected to advance understanding of biological processes involving these phenomena, such as wound healing and cancer invasion. They will also provide insights into the interplay between cellular sensing and responding mechanisms and emergent tissue-level behaviors. This project will develop a new adaptive tissue model to integrate biological and soft matter physics perspectives.

Using this model, computational and theoretical studies will produce experimentally testable and clinically relevant predictions for tuning tissue-level mechanical properties as needed. These predictions will support future collaborations between theoretical and experimental researchers, while the open-source computational tools developed through this work will facilitate further studies in tissue mechanics and adaptive materials.

The outcomes may also inspire the development of bio-mimic materials with self-healing and adaptable properties, broadening the scope of biomechanics.

This project is jointly funded by Biomechanics and Mechanobiology (BMMB) Program in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.