Broedersz aims to uncover the biophysical interaction rules that govern how cells move collectively. By combining theoretical physics, data-driven approaches, and quantitative experiments, the project seeks to deepen our understanding of processes such as tissue formation, wound healing, and cancer invasion.
With this award, Broedersz and his team will investigate how groups of cells move together to shape living tissues. The coordinated motion of large cell populations plays a fundamental role throughout life: it shapes the body during embryonic development, maintains and repairs tissues in adulthood, but can also enable cancers to spread. Much like flocks of birds or schools of fish, cells often move as collectives.
“Cells behave socially, much like birds in a flock,” explains Broedersz. “Their coordinated motion emerges from simple interactions with nearby cells rather than from a central controller, yet the rules that govern this collective behaviour remain largely unknown.”
The secret social rules of cell collectives
Understanding the interaction rules between migrating cells remains one of the major open challenges in biophysics. While experiments track how cells move with increasing precision, the principles that govern their collective coordination are still poorly understood. Broedersz’s Vici project addresses this challenge by using advanced data-driven methods to learn the hidden “rules of interaction” directly from experimental observations. By integrating physical modeling with quantitative experiments, the research aims to reveal how cells coordinate their behavior to build, repair, or sometimes disrupt tissues, with potential implications for health and disease.
Close collaboration between theory and experiment
A defining feature of the project is its strongly interdisciplinary character. The research brings together theoretical physicists, experimental biologists, and quantitative imaging specialists in a continuous feedback loop between theory and experiment. Rather than developing models in isolation, Broedersz’s team works closely with experimental collaborators to design measurements that directly test theoretical predictions and uncover the physical mechanisms underlying collective behavior.
“By combining data-driven with mechanistic physical theory, we want to move beyond simply describing how cells behave qualitatively toward discovering predictive quantitative laws of collective cellular organization” says Broedersz. “This could ultimately help us understand how tissues form and adapt — and why these processes sometimes fail in disease.
About Chase Broedersz
Chase Broedersz is University Research Chair Professor for the Theoretical Physics of Life at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research explores how physical principles govern living systems, combining statistical physics, data-driven approaches, and close collaboration with experimental scientists to understand biological organization across scales. After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics at VU Amsterdam, he was awarded a Lewis-Sigler Fellowship at Princeton University, where he studied the physics of living systems. He later became Professor of Statistical and Biological Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich before returning to VU Amsterdam to establish an interdisciplinary research program at the interface of physics and biology, focusing on chromosome organization, cell mechanics, and collective cellular behavior. He was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for his research on the physics of genome organization and serves as program director of the Physics & Astronomy BSc Joint Degree.
