Title: Making a Splash and Mixing It Up in Active Matter

Abstract: Living matter, such as biological tissue, can be viewed as a nonequilibrium hierarchical assembly in which self-driven components consume energy to organize into increasingly complex structures across scales. These living, or “active-matter,” systems exhibit remarkable properties such as adaptability, self-healing, and self-organization, raising fundamental questions about the underlying physics and whether similar functionality can be engineered in synthetic materials and other systems, including robots and drug-delivery particles. In this talk, I will focus on two classes of active systems that remain surprisingly unexplored: active matter in fluids with finite inertia and multicomponent active colloidal mixtures. I will present recent results showing novel emergent phase behavior and discuss their implications for materials design and technological applications.