Robyn Pritchard

Dr Robyn Pritchard

Postdoc

Office: 919 Rutherford Bld
Phone: +44(0)1223 3 37001
Email: rhp32 @ cam.ac.uk

TCM Group, Cavendish Laboratory
19 JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge, CB3 0HE UK.

Collaborations

Research

My research interests are mainly focused on soft matter systems, in particular the viscoelasticity in biological tissues. Previous work has looked at viscoelasticity in hydrogel’s and liquid crystal elastomers.

I am currently working on viscoelastic damping in tendon/ligament systems.

In Plain English

Viscoelasticity is the property of a material where it behaves somewhere between a liquid and solid, both storing elastic energy like a solid and dissipating energy viscously like a liquid. The idea is to explore how connective tissues such as ligament and tendon might tune their viscoelasticity to best dissipate energy from impacts (e.g., energy transmitted from the impact of a foot striking the floor in running).

Featured Publications

Robyn H Pritchard, Yan Yan Shery Huang, Eugene M Terentjev “Mechanics of biological networks: from the cell cytoskeleton to connective tissue” Soft Matter, 23, 2014
Robyn H Pritchard, Pascal Lava, Dimitri Debruyne, Eugene M Terentjev “Precise determination of the Poisson ratio in soft materials with 2D digital image correlation” Soft Matter, 17, 2013
Robyn H Pritchard, Eugene M Terentjev “Swelling and de-swelling of gels under external elastic deformation” Polymer, 9, 2013
Qilei Song, Shuai Cao, Robyn H Pritchard, Behnam Ghalei, Shaheen A Al-Muhtaseb, Eugene M Terentjev, Anthony K Cheetham, and Easan Sivaniah “Controlled thermal oxidative crosslinking of polymers of intrinsic microporosity towards tunable molecular sieve membranes” Nature communications, 5, 2014