Past Research

Recently, the focus of my work was on liquid crystal elastomers and their interactions with curvature, and I retain an active interest in the topic.

In particular, I focussed on understanding the manner in which the thermally or photo induced deformations of these materials respond in the presence of a curvature imposed either by the external system geometry or through the material itself by way of spatial dependence in the nematic director or pre-selected curvature at the time of network cross-linking.

Understanding these phenomena could lead to better options for designing machinery on small scales. Light activated switches and pumps for microfluidic circuits might be constructible from these elastomers as a soft analog to the bimetallic discs in electric kettles.

Even older research can be found here.