Tommy Angelini’s Bio and Soft Matter Lab at the University of Florida hopes to discover how system-level properties of large groups of cells — epithelial layers, endothelial networks and bacterial biofilms — emerge from microscopic dynamics.This is the latest focus of a research career that has combined molecular biophysics with cell mechanics, including the study of physical interactions between the cornea, the eyelid, and contact lenses mediated by synthetic and biological macromolecules. Angelini received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved into cell mechanics and the physics of bacterial biofilm growth during postdoctoral research in the Weitzlab at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences before joining the UF faculty in 2010.