Events

Friday, October 2nd, 13:15 | Hauptgebäude, Hochschulstrasse 4, Room 105

Dr. Anna Erzberger | From topological defects to embryos - How surface geometry informs bulk organisation

Anna Erzberger is a group leader in the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and an affiliated group leader at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on the theoretical principles underlying the self-organisation and functioning of living matter. Combining approaches from non-equilibrium statistical physics, soft matter, dynamical systems, and information theory, her group investigates how soft, active materials use deformations, flows, and patterns to process information and generate collective behavior. They also develop new theoretical and computational approaches for interfacial problems, including systems with active shape fluctuations, time-evolving domains, and boundary-driven effects. Through interdisciplinary collaborations with experimental groups, they connect these theoretical approaches to quantitative data from diverse biological systems to identify how the physics of living matter generates functional behaviors such as cell migration and embryo self-organisation. Anna earned her PhD in theoretical physics at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, where she investigated the active hydrodynamics of the cytoskeleton and received the DIGS-BB Fellow Award. She subsequently joined Rockefeller University in New York as a Feodor Lynen Fellow, where she identified theoretical principles of self-organisation underlying development and regeneration, before establishing her independent group at EMBL in 2020. Anna was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2025 and an HFSP Research Grant in 2023, joined the EMBO Young Investigator Programme in 2026, and received the inaugural Suzanne Eaton Rising Star Award for Physics of Life in 2026.