Engineering Soft Functional Materials

Soft matter engineering is an interdisciplinary field that brings together scientists from different backgrounds including chemists, material scientists, chemical engineers, mathematicians, and physicists. Developing new materials, technologies, and medical breakthroughs heavily relies on continued discoveries and innovation in this field. We are interested in soft materials from the perspective of interface and colloid science and seek to address outstanding questions in the area of colloidal assembly, especially in presence of interfaces, and in systems involving shape and chemically anisotropic building blocks. We use experiments in close collaboration with computations to study the interactions between the building blocks, the resulting microstructure, and the ensuing properties in these complex interfacial systems.