It is with great pleasure that we announce Sujit Datta (Caltech) as the recipient of the 2024 Soft Matter lectureship.
This award honours an early-career researcher who has made significant contribution to the soft matter research field. The recipient is selected by the Soft Matter Editorial Board from a list of candidates nominated by the community.
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Sujit Datta is a Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biophysics at Caltech, where he moved in 2024 from Princeton University. He received a BA in Mathematics and Physics and an MS in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He then moved to Harvard, where he studied fluid dynamics and instabilities in soft and disordered media with Dave Weitz and obtained his PhD in Physics in 2013. Sujit’s postdoctoral training was in Chemical Engineering at Caltech, where he studied the biophysics of the gut with Rustem Ismagilov. He then started his faculty career at Princeton in 2017, and was promoted to Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Chemical & Biological Engineering in 2023. He also co-led the Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) on Living & Soft Matter of the Princeton Materials Research Science and Engineering Center from 2022-2024.
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Sujit’s research is in the study of transport processes, which aims to predict and control the movement of physical entities such as molecules and cells. In particular, motivated by challenges in biotechnology, energy, medicine, and sustainability, his research group studies the transport of soft (“squishy”) and living systems—e.g., “complex” fluids, gels, and multicellular bacterial populations—through complex environments ranging from soils, sediments, and porous rocks to gels and tissues in our bodies. Sujit and his group have pioneered experimental techniques—combining microscopy, microfluidics, materials science, and biophysical characterization—to directly visualize such transport processes in model complex environments with systematically-tunable properties in the lab. He has thereby established a way to bridge the gap between idealized lab studies in uniform environments and complex processes in real-world settings. By integrating such experiments with theoretical/computational modeling, applying ideas from fluid and solid mechanics, biological physics, chemical dynamics, colloidal science, polymer physics, statistical mechanics, and network science, Sujit and his group have revealed and shed new light on the fascinating behaviors manifested by complex fluids and bacterial populations in complex environments, guiding the development of new approaches to biotechnology, environmental remediation, flow chemistry, and sustainability.
Sujit also actively leads outreach efforts in STEM to bring together diverse perspectives and provide access to researchers from traditionally under-represented groups in studies of soft and living systems. In addition to leading professional activities for a number of scientific societies and agencies, he serves on the editorial boards of Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics and the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics.
Sujit’s scholarship has been recognized by awards from a broad range of different communities, reflecting its multidisciplinary nature, including the Allan P. Colburn and 35 Under 35 Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, three awards from the American Physical Society (Early Career Award in Biological Physics, Andreas Acrivos Award in Fluid Dynamics, and Apker Award), Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, Arthur Metzner Award of the Society of Rheology, Unilever Award of the American Chemical Society, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, NSF CAREER Award, and multiple commendations for teaching (including being described as “the most caring and engaging professor I have met at the entire university”).
Sujit grew up in Toronto, but lost most of his Canadian accent by living in Abu Dhabi, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and New Jersey. In his free time, Sujit likes to play with his five-year-old daughter, cook, eat, run, and reminisce about his past life as a competitive kickboxer.
Find out more about Sujit and his research in our interview below!
How has your research evolved from your first article to this most recent article?
I was lucky to have the opportunity to start my research career as an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked in the lab of Prof. Charlie Johnson and published my first papers on the physics of carbon nanomaterials. I transitioned to soft matter physics as a PhD student at Harvard, where I studied multiphase flow through porous media and the mechanics of soft shells in the lab of Prof. Dave Weitz. When I wrapped up graduate school, I knew there remained unaddressed and interesting questions relating to my PhD work that I wanted to revisit one day — and indeed, my group has run with those and taken them in new directions.
However, for my postdoctoral work, I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and work in new areas that I knew nothing about. I was particularly intrigued by microbial processes in the gut, given their pivotal importance to our health, and given that the gut is a dynamic, rheologically- and physicochemically-complex, soft matter environment. So, as a postdoc at Caltech, I switched fields and studied the biochemical and biophysical properties of mucus and microbes in the gut in the lab of Prof. Rustem Ismagilov. I went from doing microfluidics experiments to cutting open mice—quite a change! This experience convinced me that the ideas and tools of soft matter can provide powerful insights into the behavior of living systems, and exposed me to a range of fascinating questions at the interface of soft matter and biology, particularly in the context of microbial processes, that also underlie some of my group’s current research.
So, my research has evolved quite considerably from my first article on carbon nanomaterials! I am grateful to have been able to work across diverse areas of scientific research—going from nanoscience, to complex fluid dynamics and soft mechanics, to biological physics. Drawing on all these diverse experiences, today, my research group combines microscopy, microfluidics, materials science, and biophysical characterization with theoretical/computational modeling, applying ideas from fluid and solid mechanics, biological physics, chemical dynamics, colloidal science, polymer physics, statistical mechanics, and network science to study the transport of diverse soft and living systems through complex environments.
What excites you most about your area of research and what has been the most exciting moment of your career so far?
One of the most exciting characteristics of the research that we do is how inherently cross-disciplinary it is. Our work necessarily uses techniques and principles from biology, chemistry, engineering, materials science, math, and physics to draw connections across disciplines and make discoveries that probably couldn’t have otherwise been made. As a result, I’m constantly being challenged and learning new things from across a range of fields, which is fun. Also, due to their complexity, the soft & living systems that we study consistently surprise us; they exhibit phenomena that we could have never expected a priori, and it’s fun to do the scientific detective work in figuring out why. As the saying goes: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”. Soft matter is full of incredible things that are waiting to be known.
For example, in a recent study we found that bacterial colonies unexpectedly grow in unusual “cable”-like shapes in polymeric fluids, like mucus in the body. But we pushed ourselves to go beyond simply making this observation, and were able to decipher why this phenomenon happens using concepts from colloidal science and polymer physics. It was a gratifying example of how soft matter thinking can help shed light in biology. In turn, while the behavior of passive particulates in polymeric fluids is well-studied in soft matter, bacteria are in many ways like particulates that can also actively proliferate—a feature that engenders fascinating new effects (like the formation of cables) that motivate new directions for research in soft matter.
It’s impossible for me to pick a singular most exciting moment of my career; there are too many! My group and I have been lucky to have had many ‘eureka’ experiences in many different soft & living systems—such as discovering cables as described above, showing that polymer solutions can exhibit chaotic flows in porous media, discovering that bacteria moving through crowded spaces can be thought of as active particles navigating disordered free energy landscapes, and many more.
But ultimately, the most exciting moments for me are when the students and postdocs who make these discoveries grow as researchers and individuals and move on from the lab to even bigger things. For example, I was ecstatic when I found out that my first postdoc (who went on to a faculty position after leaving my group) won the NSF CAREER award; I think I celebrated more than when I won the award myself! Another example is when I once gave a seminar at Stanford; three students who had been undergraduate researchers in my lab, and then went on to graduate school at Stanford, showed up to my seminar with a giant banner and cutout of my head and acted as my cheering squad! It’s truly gratifying to help the people I have the privilege of mentoring realize their immense potential, continue to do great things in the world, and achieve success—by whatever metric of success they have—beyond their wildest dreams.
In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in your field of research?
I certainly can’t claim to know the most important questions in my field! (And don’t know if such a thing as “most important” even exists.) But there are countless questions that I think are important and interesting, and that keep me up at night.
Many of them follow in the spirit of Philip Anderson’s classic 1972 essay ‘More is different’, in which he beautifully articulates how in complex systems “at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear”. If the whole is “not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts”, what is the right way to understand the different phenomena that emerge at different levels of complexity in multicomponent and disordered soft & living systems? What is the appropriate level of coarse graining required at these different levels such that one can distill the essential principles underlying these emergent phenomena and make quantitative predictions, but in as simple and elegant a way as possible?
Fascinating variants of these questions emerge for different soft & living systems, and continue to represent an important challenge for our field. One example is the seemingly-simple case of a viscoelastic polymer solution flowing through a porous medium—a process that is critical in many chemical, energy, and environmental settings. For a solution of a given composition and a medium of a given structure, what is the relationship between the flow rate of the solution and the pressure drop across the medium? Predicting this relationship, or even identifying what the essential ingredients are, remains an outstanding challenge—even though it is one of the most fundamental descriptors of the flow! The reason it is challenging is because this is a multiscale problem with strong couplings across scales: fluid flow through the tortuous pores (at the scale of microns) deforms polymers (at the scale of nanometers), which in turn feeds back on the flow and alters it over a broad range of scales (from nanometers to millimeters), ultimately changing macroscopic transport behavior in media that can range from millimeters to meters in size. Addressing this challenge is not just fundamentally interesting in studies of complex fluids, but is practically important in helping to formulate the right fluid and identify the right operating conditions for a given application.
Another example relates to mixed microbial communities, in which multiple different cell types self-organize into spatially structured subgroups. For a community with a given composition, in a given environment, how will the different cell types spatially organize themselves? How does one predict and control this intricate organization and its influence on community functioning? Again, this is an outstanding challenge because of the multiscale nature of the problem: the physicochemical and metabolic properties of individual cells (at the scale of nanometers to microns) are influenced by, and in turn influence, each other and their environments (over scales ranging from nanometers to millimeters), ultimately influencing spatial structure and biological function in multicellular collectives over scales as large as centimeters. Addressing this challenge is not just fundamentally interesting in biology, but is practically important to manipulate microbial communities for beneficial health or biotechnological applications.
How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?
Soft Matter is one of my favorite journals to read for a key reason. As I described in #2 above, the field of soft matter inherently cuts across traditional disciplines—drawing on techniques and principles from biology, chemistry, engineering, materials science, math, and physics to make discoveries that have impact across these disciplines. Consequently, while exciting, this cross-disciplinarity also makes it more challenging to publish soft matter research in journals that are more constrained by traditional disciplinary boundaries. The journal Soft Matter nicely addresses this challenge by transcending these boundaries. The readership is not just primarily biologists, or chemists, or physicists or so on; it is everyone.
Which of your Soft Matter publications are you most proud of and why?
It’s impossible to single one out; we only want to put out our best, highest-quality work, so my group and I devote considerable care, time, and energy to each paper we publish!
However, for the sake of addressing this question, I will deflect and instead of mentioning a paper from my group, I will highlight a recent perspective article I co-authored with 26(!) other people entitled “Soft matter physics of the ground beneath our feet”. This article emerged from a workshop I co-organized with Ian Bourg, Ching-Yao Lai, and Howard Stone at Princeton in 2022. Our goal was simple: given that the ground beneath our feet is not static, but is a continually-changing, deformable, disordered combination of soft materials, we wanted to bring together participants from diverse backgrounds to discuss problems at the interface of soft matter and geoscience and clarify unifying/open questions for future research to address. The discussions were so lively, and the opportunities for new research so vast, that many of the speakers and participants came together to articulate their ideas in this perspective article. It is a patchwork that necessarily reflects the different perspectives of the many different co-authors, and so may feel disjointed to some readers. But in doing so, I think it nicely highlights many of the opportunities for soft matter scientists to uniquely address problems in geosciences, and in turn, highlights how processes in the Earth’s surface present new problems to address in soft matter.
In which upcoming conferences or events (online or in person) may our readers meet you?
I make sure to attend the American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting, fall meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), and fall meeting of the Society of Rheology (SoR) every year.
Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with early career scientists?
Something I’ve had to learn (and am still learning) the hard way is the principle of “conservation of energy/time”. We all work hard and try do our best, highest-quality work in everything we do. Unfortunately, however, there are too many things to do in this job, and only a fixed amount of energy/time that each of us has in a day. As a result, it’s important to prioritize things carefully: by spending more energy/time on one task, you are necessarily taking away energy/time from another, even if you don’t mean to. So, I find it useful to try to devote more energy/time to the tasks that are of higher priority to me—focusing on the things where I believe I can make the biggest impact, and that spark the most joy for me, and trying to not worry too much about the rest.
How do you spend your spare time?
When I’m not working, chances are that I’m either spending time with my five-year old daughter, running, or cooking or eating.
My daughter is my favorite person. She’s funny and smart and constantly keeps me on my toes. So, we have a lot of fun together going off on all sorts of adventures.
First thing in the morning, I run and work out. I find it meditative, and it equilibrates me. As Murakami wrote: “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running.”
And then I love food. I enjoy explore different cuisines, and then bringing back memories of things I’ve eaten to experiment in the kitchen. It’s a different, and delicious, way to channel my creative juices.
To learn more about Sujit’s research, have a look at some of his recent publications in Soft Matter, these are FREE to access until 30 November. You can also check out articles from our previous lectureship winners in our lectureship winners collection.
Scaling laws to predict humidity-induced swelling and stiffness in hydrogels
Yiwei Gao, Nicholas K. K. Chai, Negin Garakani, Sujit S. Datta and H. Jeremy Cho
Soft Matter, 2021, 17, 9893-9900, DOI: 10.1039/D1SM01186C
Poroelastic shape relaxation of hydrogel particles
Jean- François Louf and Sujit S. Datta
Soft Matter, 2021, 17, 3840-3847, DOI: 10.1039/D0SM02243H
Obstructed swelling and fracture of hydrogels
Abigail Plummer, Caroline Adkins, Jean-François Louf, Andrej Košmrlj and Sujit S. Datta
Soft Matter, 2024, 20, 1425-1437, DOI: 10.1039/D3SM01470C
Influence of bacterial swimming and hydrodynamics on attachment of phages
Christoph Lohrmann, Christian Holm and Sujit S. Datta
Soft Matter, 2024, 20, 4795-4805, DOI: 10.1039/D4SM00060A
We would like to thank everybody who nominated a candidate for the 2024 Soft Matter Lectureship. The Editorial Board had a very difficult task in choosing a winner from the many excellent and worthy candidates.
Please join us in congratulating Sujit on winning this award!
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