We are a new research group supported by the Lower Saxony Center for Artificial Intelligence and Causal Methods in Medicine (CAIMed) which is funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony through funds from the program zukunft.niedersachsen of the Volkswagen Foundation. Our interests span the self-organized dynamics of living systems and their noisy response to external mechanochemical stimuli. In particular, we combine concepts from theoretical physics and chemistry to elucidate how cells organize thousands of different biomolecules in the nucleus through a combination of molecular interactions, mechanical constraints, and energy consumption. We aim to understand how chemical and mechanical signals control nucleoplasm and genome organization in healthy cells and thereby coordinate vital processes such as gene transcription, splicing, and ribosomal assembly. Additionally, to improve our understanding of human pathologies, we will investigate how cellular signals are hijacked during infection and inflammation. Our vision is to integrate the physical principles of biological organization to understand how cell and tissue homeostasis are perturbed by the expression of viral proteins during infection, cytokine signaling during inflammation, and restored upon recovery.