(5bq) Coarse-Grained Modeling of Amphiphile Membranes and Vesicles

The behavior of self-assembled membranes of amphiphilic molecules are crucial to a number of processes in biology as well as in areas such as microfluidics and drug delivery. Several important phenomena occur at the mesoscale and cannot adequately be studied by atomistic or continuum numerical models. Using appropriately coarse-grained models I investigate two topics in particular- the passage of a colloidal particle across a fluid membrane and the directed motion of a vesicle through periodic conformational changes.