Welcome to the world of soft matter! Soft matter is an umbrella term for a variety of seemingly disparate materials, which, for example, include liquid crystals, colloids and polymers, yet sharing certain common features. With expertise in computation and theory, our research is at the interface between soft matter and advanced materials, currently focused on optimally designing and developing soft advanced materials for addressing sustainability issues. We seek to devise strategies for scalable fabrication of designer advanced materials, by exploiting self-assembly routes for a range of building blocks, from the molecular to the microscale.
We are particularly interested in designing novel photonic, phononic, mechanical and opto-electronic materials for sensing, lasing, energy harvesting, etc. We are also interested in developing fundamental understanding of experimentally observed phenomena in soft materials. In the pursuit of developing soft advanced materials by design, we develop, adapt and apply a variety of computational methods to investigate the structures, phase behaviour and properties of soft matter, especially colloids and liquid crystals.