Throughout evolutionary history, life has explored the laws of physics, creating remarkable new strategies to perpetuate itself. Our group seeks to understand how these strategies arise, using microbial populations as a model. We are interested in how the physical and chemical environment influences microbes, and how these microbes in turn engineer that very environment. In particular, we study how bacterial biofilms change their local conditions by producing extracellular matrix and how cell-to-cell signals drive such behaviors. We probe theoretical models of these phenomena with the goal of building toward an emergent understanding of living matter.<\/p>\n