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On Thursday, June 25, a seminar titled “Active dynamics of epithelial tissues” will be held in Grandori Room (Building 4) at 14:00 CET.

The seminar will be given by Prof. Alexandre Kabla, University of Cambridge.

Abstract

Epithelial tissues play a crucial role during embryonic development and in adult organisms, forming essential physiological barriers within the body. These tissues frequently undergo and even instigate significant deformations while maintaining mechanical integrity. This presentation examines the autonomous force-generating behaviours of epithelial tissues and their mechanical consequences, emphasizing theoretical and computational modelling strategies. Experimental investigations of in vitro MDCK cell monolayers reveal spontaneous contractility that generates tissue-scale tension and induces curling at free edges, behaviours absent in isolated cells but emergent at the collective level. Epithelial tissues also continuously remodel through cell neighbour exchanges, particularly during embryonic morphogenesis when coordinated cell rearrangements drive large-scale tissue flows. The interplay between active force generation and passive mechanical response determines the rate and spatial organization of these processes. Through modelling, we investigate how individual cell rheology, active contractility, and mechanical coupling give rise to tissue-scale behaviours. Our findings reveal that mechanical coupling amplifies both internal and external mechanical signals, creating sensitivity to stress states and boundary conditions that cannot be predicted from single-cell properties alone.

Bio-sketch

Professor Alexandre is a professor of mechanobiology in the Engineering Department. He trained as a physicist and computer scientist. His early research focused on the mechanics of sandcastles and liquid foams. He then progressively drifted towards fibrous materials, and later to biological tissues and cell mechanics in general.

His group’s research focuses on the mechanobiology of tissues. They use numerical and analytical modelling, as well as experimentation, to study how cell assemblies respond to forces and control their mechanical properties, as well as how active processes such as cell migration lead to tissue morphogenesis.

His research is collaborative and interdisciplinary. From a technical perspective, the group has expertise in soft matter physics, rheology, mechanical characterisation of materials, microfluidics, and scientific software engineering.

 

On Thursday, June 25, two seminars will be held in Fassò Room (Building 4A) at 14:30 CET.
The first seminar will be given by Anna Dabudyk, ITES Strasbourg Institute of Earth and Environment, and is titled: Optimization of Monte Carlo simulations for physically-based groundwater recharge modelling: convergence, sensitivity analysis and spatial upscaling.
Abstract
Physically-based integrated hydrological models have become essential tools to inform quantitative management at the catchment scale. Recharge is a key process that is either computed internally or computed externally and then read as an input. In both cases, a high level of uncertainty is expected as no real measurement of recharge are available.
In this work, we use a chain of physically-based models comprising a Land Surface Model for groundwater recharge and a hydrological model that couples surface and subsurface flow processes. The main goal is to assess the impact of anthropogenic withdrawals on low flows and provide a rigorous quantification of uncertainties for both piezometric level and surface discharge.
Computing groundwater recharge using a physically-based LSM model is a rather parameter intensive approach. To quantify the uncertainties, this model uses a Monte Carlo framework to randomly sample 178 parameters per simulation. We first established that a minimum of 3,000 simulations was required for convergence. Next, we conducted a sensitivity analysis which revealed that uncertainties related to parameters are more significant than those related to meteorological forcing.
Our next step is to focus on model efficiency. Using clustering methods, we intent to select relevant pixels to compute groundwater recharge before upscaling to the entire catchment. This is a critical step, as the groundwater recharge is then used as input data for the hydrological model, for which computation times are significantly more challenging.

Bio-sketch

Anna Dabudyk is a PhD student in hydrology at ITES (Strasbourg Institute of Earth and Environment). Her research focuses on catchment-scale quantitative hydrology, using numerical modelling and statistical approaches to evaluate simulation reliability and quantify uncertainty. The main goal of her work is to understand the relationship between anthropogenic withdrawals and surface and groundwater water dynamics. Her work aims to bridge the gap between complex hydrological modelling and practical decision-making by providing uncertainty-aware numerical solutions for water management.

The second seminar will be given by Tomás Aquino, IDAEA Spanish National Research Council institute, Barcelona, and is titled: From geometry to velocity: How medium structure and water saturation shape global flow statistics.
 
Abstract
Subsurface flows exhibit rich structure across multiple scales due to complex medium geometry. In the vadose zone, i.e., the partially-saturated region that acts as a reactive filter for nutrients and contaminants, flow heterogeneity is further enhanced by the simultaneous presence of air and water. Understanding, quantifying, and predicting transport and reaction in such systems requires models that can be parameterized based on incomplete information about the pore-scale structure and saturation, which are typically known only to a limited extent.
Over the last few decades, stochastic models have gained in popularity as useful and elegant tools to fill this role. In addition to the classical inverse problem, where Monte Carlo type methods are traditionally employed to quantify uncertainty, recent stochastic transport and mixing models rely on statistical descriptions of the underlying flow field to make deterministic predictions of macroscopic quantities, such as breakthrough curves and dispersion, at larger scales. These methods typically rely on the probability of finding a certain velocity value anywhere in the domain together with a characteristic correlation length, without need for detailed knowledge of the spatial structure. Despite their success, the predictive power of such models remains limited by our inability to connect the statistics of geometric features, such as pore throat widths, to flow statistics. Indeed, current mean field theories fail to capture the flow statistics even in simple disordered media.
In the first part of this talk, I will discuss a new theory of flow statistics for saturated, disordered media, which employs a pore network description to connect flow distributions to macroscopic metrics like the porosity and the coeMicient of variation of pore throat widths. I will show that this theory performs very well for simple model porous media in two dimensions, composed of disordered arrays of circular obstacles. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how flow statistics models can be extended to partially saturated conditions.
Bio-sketch
Tomás Aquino is a Researcher at the IDAEA, a Spanish National Research Council institute in Barcelona dedicated to environmental sciences. He obtained his undergraduate and MSc degrees in Physics from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where he is originally from, and his PhD from the University of Notre Dame, IN, USA. He is the recipient of the ongoing ERC Starting Grant Uplift, which is dedicated to advancing our understanding of flow, transport, mixing and reaction in partially saturated porous media across scales.
LIA, 25 e 26 giugno 2026 il Politecnico di Milano ospiterà il XV Incontro dei Giovani Ingegneri Geotecnici (IAGIG), organizzato dall’Associazione Geotecnica Italiana (AGI) in collaborazione con il Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Ambientale. L’iniziativa rappresenta un consolidato momento di confronto, condivisione e crescita professionale rivolto a giovani ingegneri, ricercatori e professionisti del settore della geotecnica.
La partecipazione è gratuita, senza quote di iscrizione né costi per la pubblicazione degli atti. L’iscrizione è tuttavia obbligatoria, poiché l’accesso sarà consentito fino a esaurimento dei posti disponibili in aula, ed è possibile effettuarla al seguente link. Il Consiglio Nazionale degli Ingegneri riconosce 6 CFP per la partecipazione in presenza.
Maggiori informazioni sono disponibili sul sito dell’evento.
Program delle giornate e locandina. 

Within the PhD course on Elastic Wave Propagation with applications to Earthquake Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Prof. Francisco José Sánchez-Sesma, Instituto de Ingeniería, UNAM México, will deliver a lecture on Seismic Wave Propagation in Complex Geological Domains: From Site Effects in Earthquakes to Diffuse Fields in Passive Seismology.

 

The lecture will be delivered on June 22, 2026, at 16:00 (Italian time) in the Webex personal room: politecnicomilano.webex.com/meet/roberto.paolucci
This will be a repetition of the Joyner Memorial Lecture, awarded jointly by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and the Seismological Society of America (SSA), which recognizes outstanding individuals working at the intersection of earthquake science and engineering, whether it involves contributions from earthquake science to earthquake engineering, or from earthquake engineering to earthquake science. For 20 years, these distinguished speakers have contributed to building codes, seismic design guidelines, probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, and the characterization of site effects. Francisco José Sánchez-Sesma of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) delivered the 2026 Joyner Lecture at the SSA Annual Meeting in Pasadena, CA, and will do so again at the 13NCEE in Portland, OR.

Abstract
This lecture emerges from decades of research on seismic waves in complex geological media to assess ground motion, from strong shaking to weak ambient vibrations such as microtremors and seismic noise. It is dedicated to William B. Joyner, who bridged the gap between seismologists and engineers to achieve an earthquake-resilient society. Personally, the 1985 Michoacán earthquake (Mw 8.1), which caused catastrophic damage in Mexico City, was a key motivation. The Random Vibration Theory, reformulated by Boore and Joyner, helped us to craft the Mexico City building code, which incorporated the Fourier spectrum as a design concept. Seismic hazard is a big puzzle; we take little pieces and try to solve each one. The Indirect Boundary Element Method (IBEM) enabled the study of the seismic response of topographic features and alluvial valleys to educate the intuition. The need for a geomorphological description is evident. Diffuse fields allowed us to establish the exact retrieval of Green’s functions from noise cross-correlations. This leads to a theory for the H/V spectral ratio to model ambient seismic noise measurements and infer subsurface layered structures. However, including lateral irregularity is a major challenge. Preliminary results suggest it is possible to spot, from H/V results, zones that may trap energy in earthquakes.