The University of Bath invites applications for a fully-funded PhD position in Machine Learning, as part of the prestigious URSA competition. This project focuses on developing interpretable machine learning methods for high-dimensional data, with an emphasis on recognizing symmetries and incorporating them into efficient, flexible algorithms. This PhD position offers the opportunity to work within a leading research environment, using state-of-the-art tools such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Scikit-Learn. The research outcomes have potential applications in diverse fields, and students are encouraged to bring creative and interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving.

The emergent dynamics exhibited by collections of living organisms often shows signatures of symmetries that are broken at the single-organism level. At the same time, organism development itself encompasses a well-coordinated sequence of symmetry breaking events that successively transform a single, nearly isotropic cell into an animal with well-defined body axis and various anatomical asymmetries. Combining these key aspects of collective phenomena and embryonic development, we describe here the spontaneous formation of hydrodynamically stabilized active crystals made of hundreds of starfish embryos that gather during early development near fluid surfaces. We describe a minimal hydrodynamic theory that is fully parameterized by experimental measurements of microscopic interactions among embryos. Using this theory, we can quantitatively describe the stability, formation and rotation of crystals and rationalize the emergence of mechanical properties that carry signatures of an odd elastic material. Our work thereby quantitatively connects developmental symmetry breaking events on the single-embryo level with remarkable macroscopic material properties of a novel living chiral crystal system.