Bertrand Lab @ Imperial

Department of Mathematics. Imperial College London

Welcome to the Bertrand Lab @ Imperial!

We are based in the Mathematical Physics group of the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. Employing analytical and computational tools from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, soft condensed matter physics and stochastic processes, our work finds applications in the physical, life and social sciences. Our research group is particularly interested in studying the stochastic dynamics of living and reactive systems. With the aim of shining some light on complex biological processes and discovering novel physical principles, our research combines the development of new analytical methods and the modeling of real systems, from the single agent scale (e.g., via random walk theory) to the level of collective and emergent behaviours in out-of-equilibrium and disordered systems (including for instance in tissue dynamics).

We are active members of the Physics of Life Network at Imperial, the Biological Physics Journal Club and co-organizers of the MathPhys seminar series.

news

Jan 4, 2024 Fantastic news, Andy’s last PhD paper was just published in Biophysical Reports. In this paper, we develop a convolutional neural network to detect and classify nematic defects in confluent cell layers, which we test on both numerical and experimental data! (Codes available on Github)
Jan 1, 2024 As the new year starts, we welcome some more new faces (full house this year!): Jane returns after her summer fellowship as an MSc student in Applied Mathematics. Hailing from the MSc in Applied Mathematics as well, Tamsin joins us for a project in collaboration with Dr Benjamin Walter.
Dec 18, 2023 Right in time for Christmas :christmas_tree:! We are very happy to announce that Henry’s latest work was published today in Physical Review Letters. In this paper, we study entropy production in the most generic mixture of conserved phase fields with nonreciprocal couplings and additive conservative noise. In the special case of the Non-Reciprocal Cahn Hilliard model, we observe a nontrivial scaling of the entropy production rate across a parity-time symmetry breaking phase transition for which we derive an exact expression! :muscle:
Oct 27, 2023 Interested in the growth of biological tissues? Wonder how one can model this on the computer using a lattice Boltzmann approach? Check out Andy’s second paper published today in Phys. Rev. Research.
Oct 11, 2023 Another study hot off the press! In a paper published today in Phys. Rev. Research led by Luca Cocconi, we show that reciprocity-breaking fluctuations about a reciprocal mean coupling are sufficient to drive persistent motion reminiscent of self-propulsion in active bound states.
Oct 1, 2023 New academic year, new faces! This year, we are joined by two new PhD students: welcome to Callum and Tina! The lab will also host Xinyu, Peiyu and Will for their MSci final year projects. Welcome to all!