Nitin Kumar
alllivingactive.bsky.social
Nitin Kumar
@alllivingactive.bsky.social
Associate Professor, Physics, IIT Bombay.
Experimental Active and Living Matter group.

https://sites.google.com/view/nitink
Thrilled to announce that this work has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. 😃

journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
October 15, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Nitin Kumar
In another exciting development our new preprint is online:
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

This is the work of my brilliant graduate student Katerina Kourkoulou in collaboration with Maggie Liu and Arnold Mathijssen. Here is a video of the subject of our study:
September 18, 2025 at 6:47 AM
Reposted by Nitin Kumar
Very happy that the first article from my postdoc work in the Tomancak lab is now published @PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... We studied the self-organization of actin in aggregates made from Hydra cells. Thread below (1/9)
August 6, 2025 at 1:09 PM
Published in Langmuir today!
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
August 4, 2025 at 12:12 PM
Reposted by Nitin Kumar
Dreaming of a swimming pool? Bacteria are surrounded by water! Water capillary forces organize bacterial colonies into gas, nematic streams, or droplet states. New paper @natphys.nature.com led by Matt Black and Chenyi Fei, with Ned Wingreen and Josh Shaevitz!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Capillary interactions drive the self-organization of bacterial colonies - Nature Physics
Bacteria tend to live in thin layers of water on surfaces. Now the capillary forces in these layers are shown to help organize the bacteria into dense packs.
www.nature.com
August 2, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Preprint alert 📣! We provide an experimental protocol to align clay nanotubes over the entire dried deposit in spite of huge size-polydispersity. Experiments by my postdoc Arun Dadwal. Supported by @iitbombay.bsky.social

arxiv.org/html/2505.03...
Nematic ordering via vertical stratification in drying clay nanotube suspensions
arxiv.org
May 7, 2025 at 6:05 PM
(1/6) 📢Excited to share our latest work in collaboration with @harshIITMandi's group at IIT Mandi on an artificial robotic system 🤖, in experiment and theory, mimicking run-and-tumble (RT) motion seen in microorganisms 🦠. 🧵⏬
arxiv.org/abs/2502.01257
February 4, 2025 at 5:43 AM
A short video highlighting our research on the physics of homing behavior in animals, recently published in PRX Life journal.

youtu.be/Pr0UdzK7kyg?...
Self-Propelling Robot Reveal the Physics Behind Animal Homing
YouTube video by RnD @ IITB
youtu.be
January 27, 2025 at 9:17 AM
As part of the institute's outreach program #TechConnect #TechFest2024, our group showcased a hands-on experience with our active robots, demonstrating how we engineer them to uncover the physics of #LivingMatter and #ActiveMatter @IITBombay
December 20, 2024 at 2:10 AM