Featured on the cover of a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a paper by Physics graduate student Hunter King, former postdoc Robert Schroll, and professors Benny Davidovitch and Narayanan Menon. Their work identifies a fundamental difference in the symmetry-breaking processes that lead to wrinkling and crumpling of a thin sheet.
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Congratulations to our most recent PhD! Good luck to Marcelo in his future career.
Marcelo Dias successfully defended his thesis “Swelling and Folding as Mechanisms of 3D Shape Formation in Thin Elastic Sheets” on June 19. His work was advised by Prof. Chris Santangelo.
A story in Physics Today highlights the work of UMass postdoc James Hanna and Professor Christian Santangelo. Along with colleagues in the Polymer Science Department, they have developed a method to program 2D polymer films to buckle into nearly arbitrary 3D shapes. A polymer film is patterned with an array of dots whose size determines the degree a region of the gel will swell in response to a temperature change. Their research appears in the March 9th issue of Science magazine and is featured in a Perspective.