Dr Albane Thery

Assistant Professor

Email:

Office: MSB 5.22 / SLS B173

Research Clusters

Microbiology & Infectious Disease

Quantitative, Systems & Engineering Biology

Warwick Centres & Spotlights

The Zeeman Institute

Opportunities in the group

For PhD and postdoctoral opportunities, and interest in potential collaborations, please contact me at the above email address.

Research/Teaching Interests

I study how microorganisms, like bacteria and plankton, adapt and move in complex biological environments – from multispecies marine ecosystems to oral biofilms.

My work is a combination of theory and simulations, and I build minimal models for complex living systems, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary work and collaborations, both for theory and experiments.

For example, I model how these bacteria and algae move in confined spaces and flowing biological fluids. I am also interested in understanding how small, micrometre-scale organisms can sense cues from their environment for navigation, predation or escape strategies.

Research: Technical Summary

My research focuses on how interactions with complex environments shape the individual and collective behaviour of motile microorganisms such as plankton and bacteria.

One of my goals is to move away from idealized setups often used for mathematical modelling of microscale locomotion, which often consider model organisms moving in unbounded water. I instead study realistic setups including boundaries and obstacles with varied geometries, mechanical and chemical cues from the environment and complex biological fluids that contain polymers or particles.

I combine analytical methods and simulations, with techniques from fluid mechanics and soft and active matter physics including for stochastic interactions at the population level or finite element methods. I particularly enjoy working with experimental data in collaborative projects.

These models lead to novel predictions with applications to biomedical sciences. For example, we recently demonstrated that bacteria can overcome channel flows an order of magnitude stronger in biological fluids than in water, which affects the design of medical devices. I am also studying the role of bacterial morphology in severe tooth decay. Another application of my work is ecology. I connect individual-scale models that include information about flow transport, bacterial growth, or pairwise interactions, to the population scale.