• Welcome!

    Transport science plays a role in all things dynamical - and often plays the crucial role.  Learning to think effectively about fluids and transport enables one to understand and contribute to a wide range of interesting and important problems. Our group works in various areas of micro-scale fluid mechanics and transport science - microfluidics and electrokinetics; active, nonlinear and interfacial microrheology of complex materials; polymer and nanoparticle dynamics and sensing.

     

  • For more details on the Center for Formulated, Multi-Functional Soft Materials that we are associated with, please visit: https://cfm.cnsi.ucsb.edu

     

  • Current theoretical and experimental projects include:    

    • non-linear (induced-charge) electrokinetic flows, with an eye towards portable, self-contained and implantable microfluidic devices
    • nonlinear microrheology:  extending the capabilities of "microrheology" (which typically uses colliodal beads as passive tracers to measure the rheological properties of complex materials) by using active forcing to extract nonlinear material response properties
    • interfacial microrheology:  developing and employing a novel technique for measuring the rheology of fluid-fluid interfaces, with particular emphasis on natural and synthetic lung surfactant layers and surfactant-laden polymer-polymer interfaces
    • interfacial mobility of nanoparticle and copolymer surfactants

  • News

    • Welcome to Endre Joachim Mossige, our new postdoc. Joachim joins us from the Stanford University, where he did his postdoctoral research (March 2020).
    • Joe and Xiaoyu presented posters at the Gordon Research Conference on Colloidal, Macromolecular and Polyelectrolyte Solutions (February 2020). 
    • Welcome to our newest group member, Colby Fronk (December 2019).
    • Julia presented a poster at Center for NanoScience Workshop: Evolving Nanosciences, Venice, Italy (September 2019).
    • Julia participated in the Junior Nanotech Network biophysics exchange program between the Center for Nanoscience (CeNS) at LMU Munich and the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) at UCSB (June and September 2019).
    • Congratulations to Dr. Anirudha Banerjee on his successful defense (July 2019). 
    • Congratulations to Dr. Peter Chang on his successful defense (May 2019). 
    • Welcome to David Taylor, who's visiting us from Switzerland. David is a Doctoral student at EPFL and at the IBM Research lab in Zurich, and he will be with us for the first half of 2019. 
    • Welcome to our newest group members, Varun Hegde and Parth Shah. 
    • Congratulations to Dr. Alexandra Bayles on her successful defense (December 2018). 
    • Welcome to Huanshu Tan, our new postdoc. Huanshu joins us from the University of Twente, where he got his PhD in Physics of Fluids.
    • Anirudha, Alexandra, Hari, Peter, and Xiaoyu presented at the AIChE Meeting in Pittsburgh (October 2018)
    • Welcome to Joe Barakat, our new postdoc. Joe joins us from Stanford University, where he got his PhD in Chemical Engineering.
    • Congratulations to Dr. Arash Nowbahar on his successful defense (March 2018).
    • Anirudha, Alexandra, Hari, Ian, Nan, Xiaoyu and Todd presented at the APS March Meeting (March 2018)
    • We welcome our newest postdoc, Xiaoyu Tang, to the group! Xiaoyu joins us from Princeton University, where she got her PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. (February 2018)
    • Anirudha and Alexandra presented posters at the Gordon Research Conference on Colloidal, Macromolecular and Polyelectrolyte Solutions (February 2018)
    • We welcome our newest graduate student, Julia Fisher, to the group! (January 2018)
    • Congratulations to Dr. Niels Zussblatt on his successful defense (August 2017)
    • Congratulations to Dr. Doug Vogus on his successful defense (June 2017)
    • Congratulations to Anirudha for advancing to the semi-finals of the UCSB Grad Slam. Watch his talk here (April 2017)
    • Congratulations to Dr. Rodrigo Nery Azevedo on his successful defense (March 2017)
    • Congratulations to Ian on his honorable mention in the 4th Annual Art of Science competition. Read more about it here (March 2017)