My scientific interest is studying experimentally soft matter systems far from thermal equilibrium. I aim to study and understand in detail the dynamics and statistics of many such systems, and to compare them. This approach will enable us to observe emergent universal behavior in systems out of thermal equilibrium. This in turn, should pave the way to extending the framework of statistical mechanics beyond thermal equilibrium. The tools we employs for our studies are holographic optical tweezers (HOTs) for controlled optical manipulation of microscopic objects, and optical microscopy