Research

The foundation of my research is the fact that new materials will be required to solve the challenges we face today. Fields ranging from drug delivery to green energy need reconfigurable, adaptable, and multifunctional materials. Colloidal metamaterials will play an important role in solving these needs, as their fundamental building blocks — micro and nanoparticles — are inherently more tunable than the atomic and molecular building blocks of conventional materials.

The organization of these building blocks determine the properties of the materials, making structural control — that is, the ability to manipulate how the particles are arranged — of paramount importance. Nanoparticle synthesis, meanwhile, has matured into a well-established and increasingly active field of research, now able to precisely control the nanoscale size, shape, and chemical functionality of particles on the nanometer scale. The resulting particle uniformity makes self-assembly a practical way to achieve structural control in a diverse array of colloidal materials. Key to leveraging self-assembly in colloidal materials design is an understanding of what particle properties influence self-assembly and how those can be manipulated for greater structural control.

My research uses chemical physics, statistical mechanics, and molecular simulation to study the interactions between colloidal particles and how to control them to create colloidal materials by design. I develop simple models of complex colloidal systems and run large-scale Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations to uncover the driving forces of self-assembly. Additionally, I develop design algorithms to systematcally design systems with specific properties, e.g., self-assembled crystal structures.

I am also an active contributor to the high-quality open source software tools developed and maintained by the the Glotzer Group. I have made significant contributions to the group’s particle simulation toolkit, HOOMD-blue, as well as to the Freud analysis toolkit and the Signac data management framework.