Call for Abstracts – MS11: Emulating cell motility in natural porous media: from health to environment at InterPore2026
karoli...@interpore.org
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the 18th Annual InterPore Meeting – InterPore2026, which will take place 19–22 May 2026 in Nantes, France. InterPore brings together researchers from around the world working on all aspects of porous media science, including energy, climate, hydrology, materials, biology, and more.
As part of the conference, we warmly encourage you to submit an abstract to the minisymposium:
(MS11) Emulating Cell Motility in Natural Porous Media: From Health to Environment
Lead Organizer: Nicolas Waisbord – Université d’Aix-Marseille, France
Co-Organizer: Ankur Bordoloi – IRPHé, France
This minisymposium explores how microfluidic approaches are transforming our understanding of cell motility in porous environments by enabling us to replicate essential environmental features with unprecedented precision. We invite contributions that span technological innovation, experimental breakthroughs, and scaling laws that bridge pore-scale behavior to network-scale transport phenomena across both prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems.
Session Themes I. Technological Advances in Biomimetic Systems for Environment and Health
How have micromodel fabrication and design evolved to realistically reproduce porous media—from soils to vascular networks? What breakthroughs now allow us to replicate pore geometries, surface heterogeneity, chemical gradients, and flow patterns that govern cell motility in natural environments?
II. Experimental Frontiers and Unexpected Discoveries
Where are experiments driving new theoretical developments rather than merely validating existing models? What surprising behaviors or emergent motility strategies have been revealed in recent micromodel studies? How do confined geometries, heterogeneous surfaces, and complex flow fields generate phenomena not predicted by classical motility theories?
III. More Is Different: From Cells to Swarms, From Pores to Networks
“The behaviour of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear…”
— P. W. Anderson, Science (1972)
How do single-cell behaviors observed at the pore scale scale up to collective dynamics in interconnected porous networks?
What emergent properties arise when bacterial swarms or eukaryotic cell populations navigate complex pore structures?
How do local interactions translate into macroscopic transport laws, and what new physics emerges at the network scale?
We welcome contributions across all three themes, with a particular emphasis on the unique role of microfluidics in advancing both fundamental understanding and environmental or biomedical applications of cell motility.
Submit Your Abstract
Share your latest research and contribute to this important discussion by submitting an abstract to MS11 here:
🔗 https://events.interpore.org/event/58/abstracts/
We look forward to your contributions and hope to welcome you to Nantes, France, in May 2026.
Warm regards,
Karolin Weber, on behalf of the MS11 Organizing Committee