Previous research areas

Getting spherical colloidal particles to self-assemble is hard enough, but we decided to try something even more difficult: getting nanowires to self-assemble. The goal of this project was to get long, thin nanowires to spontaneously braid themselves.

We are interested in making materials that have a negative index of refraction. No naturally occurring material that we know of has this property, but it could be achieved in an metamaterial . An optical metamaterial is composed of elements that are...

We do experiments on some of the simplest self-assembling systems, called "colloidal clusters," to understand the basic physics of self-assembly. The clusters consists of a small number (say, fewer than 10 or so) spherical colloidal particles that attract...

Short, custom-designed DNA molecules can be used to create "programmable" interactions between colloidal particles, meaning that we can control how the particles self-assemble through the DNA sequences. Currently we are trying to create colloids with...

We worked as part of a larger collaboration to build an artificial cell that mimics the behavior of a living cell. Our focus is on understanding and mimicking intracellular transport.