Prof. Douglas R. Tree is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Brigham Young University. He received a B.S. from BYU in 2009 and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2014, both in Chemical Engineering. At Minnesota, he worked with Kevin Dorfman studying the polymer physics of nanoconfined DNA and its relevance for genome mapping technologies. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Glenn Fredrickson at the University of California, Santa Barbara on the kinetics of phase separation of polymer materials. The Tree group continues to focus on non-equilibrium assembly processes in polymer materials including nonsolvent induced phase separation, polymer crystallization, and the non-equilibrium self-assembly of polymer vesicles. Prof. Tree was the recipient of the ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award in 2018. He can be found on Twitter @TreeSoftMatter.
Read Douglas’ Emerging Investigator article “Using reactive dissipative particle dynamics to understand local shape manipulation of polymer vesicles” and check out all of the 2021 Soft Matter Emerging Investigator articles here.
How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?
Soft Matter is a great place to publish our research. The audience is perfectly suited for our work, and the reviews are generally fast and well-handled.
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 really excited about exploring concepts related to non-equilibrium self-assembly of soft materials. So much of the soft materials physics of living systems takes place out of equilibrium, and I think we are just beginning to understand how to understand these systems. The most challenging aspect is that we no longer have all of the nice features of equilibrium to rely on!
In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?
How can we simplify our understanding of out-of-equilibrium processes? What are the principles of “universality” that could guide us? I think we are going to need new theories and/or simulation techniques along these lines in order to rationally engineer synthetic systems that can mimic living ones.
Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?
Pick people you want to work with not topics. As scientists/engineers, we get enamored with a topic of interest. However, your career (and life!) is more defined by your relationships with people than the topics you study. A great mentor can make your life wonderful, and a terrible mentor can make your life miserable.
