Overview

Geomaterials, much like living organisms, have evolved over millions of years, developing unique mechanical and transport properties through nature’s architected design. Their microstructure governs important functions such as soil stability, carbon sequestration, groundwater storage, and nutrient delivery. As we seek innovative sustainable materials, the complex composition (colloidal particles, polymers, and microbes) and properties of geomaterials offer inspiration. My research proposes a novel geoinspired engineering approach, combining nature’s design principles with advanced material synthesis, instrumentation, and experimental data-driven learning to develop advanced sustainable soft and living matter, across multiple length scales.

Current and Past Research

My previous research has focused on understanding the effects of multiscale interactions on the soft-living interactions and flow properties of heterogenous dense suspensions.
Doctoral Research. I explored colloidal surface anisotropy as a powerful tool for engineering flow behavior in dense suspensions. I synthesized model polymer-based colloids with tunable surface roughness and assembled a confocal-rheometer to investigate flow-induced microstructural changes. My work revealed the first experimental 3D sheared structure in particular suspensions, uncovering the structure-property relationships that inform design principles for engineering shear-thickening fluids from nature-inspired materials for shock absorbing applications. By linking nearest-neighbor contacts to shear thickening rates, I connected the mechanics of dense colloidal suspensions to granular materials by correlating suspension elasticity at zero shear to its “thermal structure” at jamming.

Postdoctoral Research. My postdoctoral research was focused on two areas: (i) multiscale soft matter mechanics of heterogenous geomaterials and (ii) emergent dynamics in living systems
Heterogenous Soft Matter Mechanics. I developed a framework to explain the flow and failure behavior of soft particulate materials by decoupling the interparticle interactions and the intrinsic mechanics. This led to discovering rheological constitutive equation with a novel material-controlled brittle-ductile transition that connects granular materials to gels. The geoinspired framework offers insights for designing multiphase soft matter systems, e.g. lithium-ion battery slurries. We further modified the framework by adding soft tribology, and applied to sustainable geomaterials, revealing how the unique balance of cohesive, frictional, and viscous elements in baseball rubbing mud creates a soft material with unusual gripping properties.

Living matter-induced transport. I used colloidal tracers dispersed in E. coli suspensions as model active-passive systems, and decoupled the effects of the geometry and bacterial concentration on tracer dispersal. Through collaborations, we discovered the emergence of bioconvection as function of bacterial concentration, which enhances mixing. These findings provide insights into microbe-mediated mixing in nature and industrial applications.