Moumita Dasgupta
Moumita Dasgupta is a Lecturer at Department of Physics at Smith College. She was a teaching fellow at Amherst College prior to this appointment. She is passionate about undergraduate teaching and adapts a combination of traditional pedagogical styles and more modern active learning, project based learning and design thinking methodologies. She cares about creation of an inclusive learning environment in classroom where individuals with diversity of background, outlook and nationality feel equally welcome to participate and contribute. Her engagement with in the Human in STEM chapter at Amherst College which is a program that aims to foster students who see themselves and diverse others as capable of succeeding in STEM, while honoring their unique and shared identities, helped her being aware of related issues and work on strategies to address them.
She specializes in soft matter and biophysics. She is inclined towards studying bio-inspired soft matter systems to understand underlying physical principles which often lie at the intersection of fluid dynamics, solid mechanics and material science. Understanding swimming mechanism of microorganisms or bending of elastic filaments in viscous or viscoelastic environments are some examples of systems she has investigated. She collaborates with Prof. Ashley Carter at Amherst College to understand the folding mechanisms and pathways of single DNA molecules and DNA nanostructures on addition of condensing proteins.