(3an) Improving Our Quality of Life with Colloidal Interactions: From Consumer Products to Protein Drugs

Colloidal dispersions exist in nearly every area of our daily lives from paint applied to protect our homes to therapeutic proteins. Universally, their material properties and functionality are defined by the subtle interactions between particles. This in turn leads to local structure, macroscopic phase behavior, and mechanical properties. Although the simplest of colloids, the mono-disperse hard sphere, is well understood there are significant gaps in our understanding of more complex systems that are often polydisperse and interact via a pair-potential.

One focal point of my research is to progress our understanding of how complex colloidal interactions and polydispersity relate to equilibrium structural states and phases, and states out of equilibrium induced by flow. This presentation summarizes two separate research projects include my work during my postdoc: i) “The phase behavior and shear induced structural reordering of a nanoparticle dispersion with adhesive hard sphere interactions,” completed at the University of Delaware; ii) “Stability and rheology of a model protein (Lysozyme) with long-range repulsion and short-range attraction,” that I started during my National Research Council postdoctoral appointment at the NIST Center for Neutron Research. By using a platform that leverages both experiments and theory I present unique advances that can be universally applied to the formulation and process optimization of complex colloidal systems.