Colloquium Series: Tom Truskett (University of Texas)

Join us for another event in the 2018-2019 Colloquium Series as APS welcomes Tom Truskett, Ph.D. to present on his recent research. Dr. Truskett is currently the Chemical Engineering Department Chair, Bill L. Stanley Leadership Chair, and Les and Sherri Stuewer Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where his group studies “interfaces and the structure & dynamics of complex fluids.”

Inverse design of interactions for assembly

Nanometer-scale, colloidally-stable particles suspended in a fluid can be driven to assemble into a wide variety of different structures depending on the control parameters of the system and the nature of the effective interparticle interactions. In many cases, the relevant interactions are tunable via external fields, physical or chemical modification of the particle surfaces, or changes in the composition of the suspending solvent. In this talk, we discuss some of the theoretical challenges associated with the inverse design of interactions for assembly into a targeted structure, the detection of such a transition, and the opportunities that new machine learning based simulation approaches provide for addressing both.