Discovery and design of emergent behavior in soft materials
Nature organizes itself with often startling complexity at every length scale accessible to human inquiry, resulting in a wide range of materials with varied structural and dynamical properties. An outstanding current goal of materials science is to harness the often-subtle self-organization displayed by nature in order to design materials with tailor-made functionalities in the laboratory. This talk will focus on computational efforts, in support of that goal, to understand the emergence of structure and its relationship to dynamics in soft materials on the nano- and micro-scales. I will primarily discuss two recent projects: In the first, we closely examined how bulk structure emerges in a model system of colloidal clusters, thereby uncovering a relationship between interparticle interaction shape and structural evolution. In the second project, we used linear control theory to predict mechanical response in jammed and disordered systems, thereby uncovering an often-obscured relationship between amorphous structure and rearrangement dynamics. This work collectively demonstrates the intertwined relationship between local interaction, local structure, and complex global behavior in soft material systems, and points toward exciting future directions related to the design of that behavior.
Bio: Erin Teich is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Wellesley College, where she uses simulation and theory drawn from statistical physics and network science to investigate problems related to understanding and designing complex behaviors in soft materials. She received her Sc.B. in physics from Brown University in 2011, and subsequently served with AmeriCorps for a year, where she worked in a community center in Chicago. Erin received her Ph.D. in applied physics in 2018 from the University of Michigan, where she focused especially on elucidating mechanisms for glass formation in colloidal systems. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Dani Bassett’s complex systems group at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on network models of materials and soft matter approaches to questions in neuroscience, before joining the faculty at Wellesley in 2022.