Soft Matter Blog

Jeremy Cho is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Previously, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department where he studied water transport and solid mechanics of granular hydrogel systems. He received his PhD and SM in mechanical engineering from MIT where he focused on phase-change heat transfer and interfacial phenomena. He received his BSE in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan. In 2022, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER and the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator awards. As he is originally from Hawaiʻi, Jeremy named his group “Da Kine Lab” from Hawaiian Pidgin as the term is a placeholder similar to “whatchamacallit” representing the very diverse range of research topics he pursues: liquid-vapor phase-change phenomena, heat and mass transfer, interfacial and wetting phenomena, surfactant chemistry, and polymer physics.

Find out more about his work via:

Website: dakine.sites.unlv.edu

LinkedIn: Jeremy Cho – Assistant Professor – University of Nevada-Las Vegas | LinkedIn

Read Jeremy Cho’s Emerging Investigator article http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/D2SM01215D

How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?

To me, Soft Matter, is the catch-all journal for fields that are near and dear to me: polymers, mechanics, and transport. This is my third Soft Matter paper—and the journal has a special place in my heart as it is where I published my first paper with my own lab group since becoming faculty. I look forward to continuing to publish in Soft Matter and getting better connected with its highly diverse readers.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?

Actually, some of the most challenging things can be the most exciting parts. We deal with a lot of polymer theory and thermodynamics so we try to visualize how polymer strands behave—they’re too small to just fire up a microscope and observe. These are very difficult thought experiments, but over the course of many discussions and drawings with students and colleagues and poring over the literature, I found that analogies can be incredibly helpful. We end up coming up with pretty hilarious analogies—often with food—that we feel really illustrates certain concepts in a very obvious way. With this paper, it was a noodles as polymer strands analogy. And the analogy went deeper where if you imagine that if you are eating the noodles in a bowl of noodle soup, the volume fraction of noodles diminishes, loosening up the mixture—akin to a hydrogel becoming softer and permeable. I always felt that just throwing up an equation can only do so much. Being able to convey an understanding in a way that is relatable to the co-authors, readers, your family members, and really anyone is such a challenging yet exciting task. Nonetheless, I believe being an effective scientific communicator, both to our field and the public, is an important duty.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?

Sometimes, the best questions come from non-scientists who ask me about what the work in our field means. It helps us define a purpose for our research. I also believe it is important for us, in the field, to ask each other to “explain it like we’re five” as a constant check on the familiarity of our understanding on a topic.

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

Starting a brand new research group is tough! Getting your students to immediately understand your past work and continue it in their own way is something that doesn’t just happen as smoothly as an Olympic baton handoff. I would say that showing your passion and enthusiasm for a topic or skill set really does rub off on your students and eventually they will find their way.

Morgan Stefik is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina and is the Founding Director of the South Carolina SAXS Collaborative. He obtained a BE degree in Materials Engineering from California Polytechnic State University in 2005 and a PhD degree in Materials Science from Cornell University in 2010. He then completed postdoctoral research at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His accolades include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018, recognition as an Emerging Investigator by the Journal of Materials Chemistry A in 2017, a Breakthrough Star Award from the University of South Carolina in 2018, election to the council of the International Mesostructured Materials Association in 2018, selection as an ACS PMSE division Young Investigator in 2020, recognition as an Early Career Scholar by the Journal of Materials Research in 2022, a Garnet Apple Award for Teaching Innovation from the University of South Carolina in 2022, and a Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Fellowship in 2022.  Morgan can be found on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/morganstefik

Read Morgan’s Emerging Investigator article http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/D2SM00513A

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?

I am most excited about kinetic-control broadly and particularly as applied to polymer assemblies. Rather than finding the singular equilibrium arrangement at some condition, kinetic-control opens up the possibility to make infinite different configurations.  Some of these new configurations can often enable new and useful properties or help solve existing problems. Reproducibility is a significant challenge with kinetic-control since such processes are inherently pathway-dependent and one often does not know which processing parameters are important at the beginning. Furthermore, many of the characterization techniques are only convenient at the end of processing which makes it that much more difficult to figure out what was happening throughout the entire processing timeline.  The tremendous potential for new and exciting capabilities, however, make this challenge worthy of attention from my perspective.

Ting Ge is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina. He earned his BS degree in 2007 from the University of Science and Technology of China followed by a Ph. D. degree in 2013 from Johns Hopkins University. Subsequently, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Research Triangle of North Carolina in the USA, first at UNC-Chapel Hill and then at Duke University. He is interested in investigating the microscopic origin of the macroscopic behaviour of various soft matter systems. A combination of molecular simulations and theory is employed in his research activities.

They can be found on Twitter @TingGe15

Read Ting Ge’s Emerging Investigator article http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/D2SM00731B

How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?

The interdisciplinary feature of Soft Matter makes it an ideal place for publishing my research on the force-driven active dynamics of nanorods in polymeric fluids. The microscopic insights from the combined computational and theoretical research are anticipated to intrigue the readers of Soft Matter across different disciplines, such as the material scientists who study the force-driven processing of functional nanorod-containing polymer composites and the biomedical engineers who develop nanorod-based techniques for drug delivery and imaging.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?

The most exciting aspect of my research is the elucidation of the microscopic origin of the macroscopic behavior of various soft matter systems. The goal is achieved through the combination of molecular simulations that have unparalleled access to detailed microscopic information and theoretical modeling that delineate the hierarchy of multiple time and length scales. Topics currently investigated include (1) the effects of polymer topology on the thermodynamics, rheology, and mechanics of polymeric materials, (2) the transport of nanoscale objects in complex polymeric environments, as well as (3) the scale-bridging physics in the fracture behavior of thermoplastics and elastomers. The most challenging aspect of these research topics is making close connections to the synthesis, characterization, and measurements of the relevant soft matter systems in real experiments, both in the setup of a sound model for the molecular simulations and theory and in the comparison between the simulation, theory, and experiments.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?

In my opinion, the most important questions in the research on nanoscale transport in a complex soft matter environment should target the active and far-from-equilibrium nature of a soft matter environment commonly present in living systems, which differ distinctively from the passive and equilibrium nature of many synthetic soft matter materials. One example is the diffusion of virus nanoparticles through a mucus gel network which is essential in preventing lung infection.

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

Starting my research group in January 2020 right ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic was not an easy task. I would love to share one quote with my fellow scientists, “The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind”.