(6gi) An Active Approach to Colloidal Self-Assembly

Both as a postdoctoral researcher and Ph.D student, I have been particularly interested in understanding how colloidal active matter can be used as a tool to engineer the microscopic. This rapidly growing field focuses on characterizing the individual and collective behavior of synthetic micro-swimmers and self-propelled colloids. These active particles can be thought of as the synthetic analogues of swimming bacteria. However, a major benefit of these synthetic variants over their biological counterpart is the ability to systematically tailor interparticle interactions and dynamically modulate swim speed. The functionality of synthetic active particles potentially makes them the ideal tool to manipulate and self-assemble matter at the microscale. In this poster, we explore to what extent activity can be used as an extra handle to promote the self-assembly of colloidal building blocks designed to form a variety of microstructures and under what conditions the complex self-assembly landscape can be simplified and biased toward a particular target structure.

Research Interests: Using a combination of cutting-edge computer simulations and analytical theory, my research revolves around developing novel techniques to manipulate, direct, and self-assemble matter at the micro-scale. A significant thrust in my work is developing advanced computational methods that provide a consistent and faithful description of colloidal systems with the highest level of computational efficiency.

Teaching Interests: Thermodynamics, Kinetics, Statistical Mechanics, General Chemistry, Physics, Computational Methods