Essential functions for life that range from swimming in single cell protists to mucus clearance in humans require the generation of long range flows with a specific topology. To generate these large scale flows thousands of micrometer-scale motile cilia must integrate their activity across centimeter-scale surfaces. The goal of our lab is to identify the key physical properties of individual cilia that control the collective phenotypes of a ciliary array and the structure of the flow it generates. To truly understand how physical observables interface with biological mechanisms we aim to uncover the molecular pathways that control these key parameters.