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I am a Post Doctoral Researcher in the group of Guillaume Salbreux at The Francis Crick Institute, London.  With a background in theoretical soft matter, I joined Salbreux' group in Nov. 2015, following my interest in gaining quantitative understanding of living systems. The problems that I am broadly interested in are related to cell/tissue mechanics, cell cycle, pattern formation and emergence of collective phenomena in living systems.  My approach towards building an understanding of the experimental system at hand is to propose a minimal physical model that is guided by the experiments. Once an appropriate minimal model is proposed, I like to get involved in a close crosstalk between experiments and theoretical model, each shaping the other.  I particularly enjoy finding out how wide and quantitative such comparisons can get in the context of a given experimental system and questions at hand.  I work in close collaboration with experimental groups at UCL. With Prof. Guillaume Charras I am involved in quantitative modelling of short time cell rheology.  I am also interested in understanding various aspects of cell division by building minimal physical models. This work is in collaboration with the group of Prof. Buzz Baum. Before starting my stint at The Francis Crick Institute, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Prof. Cristina Marchetti's group where I worked on pattern formation in active nematics on frictional substrates. During my doctoral work in the group of Prof. Madan Rao, I worked on exploring the consequences of an interplay between patterning dynamics of polar active filaments and the curved membranes. My research work hitherto has been centred around the continuum description of active matter, a field which stands at the interface of soft matter, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and biology and has been increasingly seen as a useful perspective to understand the functioning of living systems. At Francis Crick Institute, I am interested in exploring the quantitative relevance of a physicists' approach to the problems in biology by building minimal models with predictive potential. 

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Pragya Srivastava

Post-Doctoral Researcher

Guillaume Salbreux' group

The Francis Crick Institute,

1 Midland Rd,  London

NW1 1AT, UK

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