Researcher: Lukas F. Lang, Jocelyn Étienne, Nilankur Dutta, Bénédicte Sanson, Elena Scarpa, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb 

The main goal of this project is to understand cellular processes in the developing embryo of Drosophila. We aim to identify the mechanisms and driving forces of tissue formation, tissue regrowth after incurring significant damage, and the collective motion of cells. Mathematical models of, for instance, cell membranes typically include unknown physical parameters. A well-established way to infer these from measurements is to probe tissue mechanics with the help of laser ablations in order to measure e.g. recoil velocities. In this project, we aim to utilise image analysis and inverse probems to estimate these parameters automatically and reliably from confocal microscopy images of live Drosophila embryos.