Sonia A. Contera, Professor of Biological Physics and Associate Head, Department of Physics, University of Oxford. She works on physics at the interface of biology, nanotechnology, and information processing and is an expert in atomic force microscopy of biological systems. She has a special interest in the role of mechanics in biology. Her interest in matter at the nanometre scale led her from a PhD at Osaka University (Japan) on the physics of nanostructures, to biology. Sonia’s multidisciplinary journey is a quest to interrogate how matter entangles itself with its environment, storing information in time and space, to create (and sometimes to compute) complex structures (from the nanometre scale up) that are able to adapt, learn, reproduce and evolve to become “alive”.
Her main interest is understanding the profound physical meaning of “biological shape”; she studies the physics of “biological growth and shape” in diverse systems such as plants, neural networks and tumours. Sonia studied and worked in Madrid, Moscow, Prague, Beijing, Osaka and Aarhus before moving to Oxford. “Nano Comes to Life: How Nanotechnology Is Transforming Medicine and the Future of Biology”, Princeton University Press .
