The soil dwelling bacterium Myxococcus xanthus is an amazing organism that uses collective motility to hunt in giant packs when near prey and to form beautiful and protective macroscopic structures comprising millions of cells when food is scarce. I will present an overview of how these cells move and how they regulate that motion to produce different phases of collective behavior. Inspired by recent work on active matter and the physics liquid crystals, I will discuss experiments that reveal how these cells generate nematic order, how defect structure can dictate global behavior, how transient polar states govern the ultimate dynamics, and how cells actively tune the Péclet number of the population to drive a phase transition from a gas-like flocking state to an aggregated liquid-droplet state during starvation.

The Natural Sciences Division invites you to join us in Hayes Hall 109 on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 11:10 a.m. for this presentation from Joshua Shaevitz, professor of physics and biophysics at Princeton University. Lunch will be available after the talk for attendees who wish to stay and meet with Shaevitz.

We also invite students to meet Shaevitz on Wednesday, Sept. 18, at 4 p.m. in Mather 306 for an info session on science careers and graduate school careers. We hope to see you there!