New in the DASM Lab
Our newest paper titled, "A foundational framework for the mesoscale modeling of dynamic elastomers and gels," is now published. Conducted as part of my postdoctoral appointment in the Mechanics for Material Design Lab (Cornell University), this work significantly reduces the computational cost of molecular dynamics for elastomers and gels containing dynamic bonds that break and reform reversibly. Thus, it improves our ability to predict the emergent mechanical properties of these dynamic polymers as a function of their molecular design inputs.
John Receives Spring 2025 EXCEED Inclusive Innovation Internship
2024-11-06
A big congratulations to John Mehalak on receiving an Inclusive Innovation Internship sponsored by Binghamton's Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Discovery (EXCEED) program! John is a third year undergraduate researcher working on the development of new multimaterial additive manufacturing devices for photocurable elastomers. He's shown here with his custom-built UV curing station for controlled characterization of photocurable resins.
Rob recently presented some of his work on the agent-based modeling of fire ant rafts at Binghamton's Fall 2024 Center for Complex Systems (CoCo) Seminar series. Big thanks to Professor Hiroki Sayama from Binghamton's SSIE Department for orchestrating the talk.
The name fo the talk is "Inferring Local Interactions from Global Response in Condensed Active Matter". If you're interested in learning more, check it out in the link above!
Rob Presents Postdoc Work at 2024 GRC for Computational MSE
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2024-07-21
I enjoyed presenting some of my postdoctoral work at a Gordon Research Conference (GRC) for Computational Materials Science and Engineering in Newry, Maine. This workshop centered on "The Role of Theories, Simulation, and Machine Learning in Materials Discovery". Our work presented a new, physically-motivated method of modeling polymers that contain dynamic bonds at mesoscales. Read more about it here!
Recent work from Rob's time as a Ph.D. student in the Vernerey Soft Matter Mechanics Lab (CU Boulder) has been featured on BingU news. Check it out!
Our newest paper titled, "Catch bond kinetics are instrumental to cohesion of fire ant rafts under load," is now available in PNAS. Conducted as part of my Ph.D. research appointment in the Vernerey Soft Matter Mechanics Lab (CU Boulder), this work uncovers strong evidence that fire ant rafts - floating structures literally comprsied of thousands of worker ants cohered through hand-holding - utilize "catch bond" behavior. Catch bonds are bonds that exhibit longer lifetimes when subjected to some characteristic range of forces. We suspect that fire ants utilize catch bond behavior to prolong the unification of their floating raft structures when exposed to environmental influences like water current. Check out the paper for more details!
Check out our new paper in Nature Materials led by Mustafa Abdelrahman and Taylor Ware of the Biomedical Engineering Department at Texas A&M! This work, which I contributed to as part of the the Vernerey Soft Matter Mechanics Lab (CU Boulder), centers on stimuli-responsive constituents that entangle and aggregate on-demand. It offers a novel means for mimicking some of the functional behaviors exhibited by living systems such as fire ant rafts. Read the paper for more details!