Pioneer of mechanobiology | Humboldt Professor Benoît Ladoux

Benoît Ladoux’s special research interest is located at the intersection of biophysics, cell biology and engineering, in a field known as mechanobiology, in which the physicist is a world leader. Using unconventional approaches and thinking out of the box, he has achieved ground-breaking pioneering work and developed new technologies.
His interdisciplinary team wants to discover how cells and tissue generate and respond to mechanical forces and how, conversely, this stress determines changes in the form, migration and differentiation of cells during development. Insights into such principles of cell self-organisation play an important role in developmental biology and cancer research.
In order to investigate these issues, Ladoux and his team have built a raft of micro and nano fabrication tools which can control and measure the chemical and mechanical environment of cells. One example is the use of so-called micropillars to measure cell force: for this purpose, the cells are fixed on a surface which has tiny mobile columns acting as force sensors. Their deformation can be captured by a light microscope.
In his role as a Humboldt Professor at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Benoît Ladoux is invited to work on translating basic mechanobiological research into concrete health care in areas such as the barrier function of the intestinal mucosal membrane and tumour development. He is invited to assume one of the four leadership positions and a professorship in biophysics at the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, an interdisciplinary joint research center run by FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Universitätsklinikum Erlangen (UKER) and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Here he is scheduled to cooperate with, amongst others, two further Humboldt Professors, Jochen Guck and Kristian Franze, to facilitate synergies.
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