Professor Morton Denn. Director, Benjamin Levich Institute, Departments of Chemical Engineering and Physics. Research interests: rheology; nonlinear fluids, including liquid crystals, polymers and polymer blends, and yield-stress materials; polymer interfaces; flow instabilities.

Professor Joel Koplik. Research interests:

1. Molecular fluid mechanics - use atomistic simulations to analyze small-scale structure of fluid flows in situations where the continuum description is inadequate, Current problems: surfactant assisted spreading dynamics, polymeric extrusion flows, nano-flows on patterned substrates, particle adhesion.  
2. Transport in porous media - study fluid, passive tracer and particulate flow in random geometries representing aquifers and hydrocarbon reservoirs. Current work emphasizes flow in fractures and fracture networks, and in particular the effects of the self-affine roughness of natural fractured rock surfaces.  
3. Superfluid vortex dynamics  

Current students - Yiguang Yan (ME), Jon Halvorsen (ChE)

Current postdocs - Tak Shing Lo, German Drazer (shared with Acrivos)

Professor Hernan A. Makse. Our research group is devoted to the exploration of a variety of out of equilibrium systems in terms of their behavior as they experience structural arrest or jamming. We aim to understand a class of soft-matter systems spanning from granular materials, colloidal suspensions, dense emulsions to glasses in search of a unifying theoretical framework through a statistical mechanics formulation of jammed matter. The group has a strong focus on the theoretical and computational approaches in parallel with laboratory experiments, creating a most productive research environment. The numerical simulations in parallel architectures guide the diverse experiments which employ a variety of techniques including granular rheology under slow shear and confocal microscopy in conjunction with magneto-manipulation as well as oscillatory shear for the exploration of the colloidal and the emulsion systems.

Current students - Chaoming Song and Ping Wang

Current postdocs - Yevgeny Yurkovetsky and Nicolas Gland

Professor Mark Shattuck. Research interests:

Granular Media: Mesoscopic Physics on a Laboratory Scale — Granular materials, complex nonlinear pattern formation, and control of complex patterns are at the forefront of our understanding of collective behavior. The study of granular materials provides insight into poorly understood and vitally important industrial problems, and an unprecedented opportunity to investigate experimentally the theoretical underpinnings of statistical physics. In granular systems, collective behavior and pattern formation can occur with a small number of macroscopic particles. This property creates a unique opportunity to gain a fundamental understanding of mesoscopic systems, such as colloids, lubrication, and nanoscale porous media. Pattern formation in granular systems illustrates the profound link between granular flows and ordinary fluids and is a cornerstone of our research.
Patterns: Competition and Control — The study of pattern formation has produced an understanding of simple bifurcations to single-patterned states in spatially extended systems. Patterns in nature, however, display a complexity which defies this basic understanding. We will push the study of pattern formation to a new level of complexity using novel experimental techniques to study systems which combine large numbers of spatial modes with pattern competition and spatiotemporal inhomogeneous forcing. Further, we will use spatiotemporal perturbations to control patterns and stabilize them beyond their normal range of stability. This is a prerequisite step for control of complex pattern formation in industrial processes, and control of natural systems such as weather, evolution, and thought.

Current undergraduate students: Roberto Martin (CE), John Okogun (ME)
Current graduate students: Rohit Ingale (ChE)
Current postdocs: Pedro Reis (Phy)

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