Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments
subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds …

Early amniote development is a highly regulative and self-organized process, capable to adapt
to interference through cell-cell interactions, which are widely believed to be mediated by …

A colloidal particle driven by externally actuated rotation can self-propel parallel to a rigid
boundary by exploiting the hydrodynamic coupling that surfaces induce between translation …

Biased locomotion is a common feature of microorganisms, but little is known about its
impact on self-organization. Inspired by recent experiments showing a transition to large-scale …

Most motile bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments.
These semirigid filaments repeatedly join (“bundle”) and separate (“unbundle”), resulting in a …

The design of artificial microswimmers has generated significant research interest in recent
years, for promise in applications such as nanomotors and targeted drug-delivery. However, …

Solutions to the Stokes equations written in terms of a small number of hydrodynamic image
singularities have been a useful tool in theoretical and numerical computations for nearly 50 …

To understand how a spherical geometry influences the dynamics of gravity-driven
subduction of the oceanic lithosphere on Earth, we study a simple model of a thin and dense …

The segregation of the extra-embryonic lineage is one of the earliest events and a key step
in amniote development. Whereas the regulation of extra-embryonic cell fate specification …

This dissertation contains original research on a range of problems involving the locomotion
of different types of microswimmers, including both biological microorganisms and artificial …