Chemical Engineering Seminar: Sujit S. Datta (Princeton)

Description

The goal of our lab is to determine the fundamental principles governing applications of soft materials in energy, environmental science, and biotechnology.

The materials we study include polymer solutions and gels, colloidal dispersions, immiscible fluid mixtures, and “living” materials such as biofilms. These materials hold great promise in helping to solve engineering challenges like water remediation, oil recovery, CO2 sequestration, and drug delivery.

However, applying soft materials typically involves their transport through complex environments—like porous rocks or tissues in the human body—where the environment alters the material, the material itself alters the environment, and these coupled dynamics give rise to non-trivial emergent behavior. Understanding and controlling these interactions is a new frontier for engineering; this is what our lab aims to do.

We are tackling this challenge by integrating microscopy and image analysis, microfluidics and rheology, and materials processing and characterization. We also complement our experiments with theoretical modeling, using ideas from fluid dynamics, polymer physics, soft mechanics, and network theory. Our work is thus highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary, combining expertise from engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science. Ultimately, we strive to do fundamental research that can make a meaningful, positive impact in society.

Hosted by: Abe Stroock 

Sujit Datta's website: https://cbe.princeton.edu/people/sujit-datta