Academic career
Sharon Glotzer joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in 1993 as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the Polymers Division of the Materials Science & Engineering Laboratory. She became a permanent member of the Polymers Division, and was the co-founder, deputy director, and then director of the NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science from 1994 to 2000. In January 2001 she moved to the University of Michigan as a tenured associate professor in Chemical Engineering and in Materials Science & Engineering. She is now the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering, and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering. Glotzer holds additional appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, Applied Physics, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering, and is a core member of the Biointerfaces Institute. She is a member of several boards, including the board of directors of the Materials Research Society, and the board on Chemical Sciences and Technology of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She serves as associate editor of the leading nanoscience journal ACS Nano .
Research and achievements
Glotzer made fundamental contributions to the field of the glass transition, for which the molecular dynamics simulation of Lennard-Jones particles exhibiting dynamical heterogeneity in the form of string-like motion in a 3D-liquid [3] is of particular significance. [4] In addition, her paper together with Michael J. Solomon on anisotropy dimensions of patchy particles [5] has become a classic work, inspiring research directions of groups around the world. Glotzer and collaborators also hold the record for the densest tetrahedron packing and discovered that hard tetrahedrons can self-assemble into a dodecagonal quasicrystal. [6]
Glotzer and collaborators coined the term ‘Directional Entropic Forces’ [7] in 2011 to denote the effective interaction that drives anisotropic hard particles to align their facets during self-assembly and/or crystallization. This idea, which builds on Onsager's work on spherocylinders, [8] allows for predictions of expected assembled crystal and crystal-like structures from attributes of the particles' shape. [9]
According to Google Scholar, her publications have received over 22,000 citations and her h-index is 75. [10]
In physics, chemistry, and materials science, percolation refers to the movement and filtering of fluids through porous materials. It is described by Darcy's law. Broader applications have since been developed that cover connectivity of many systems modeled as lattices or graphs, analogous to connectivity of lattice components in the filtration problem that modulates capacity for percolation.
Self-assembly is a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction. When the constitutive components are molecules, the process is termed molecular self-assembly.
Graphene is an allotrope of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice nanostructure. The name is derived from "graphite" and the suffix -ene, reflecting the fact that the graphite allotrope of carbon contains numerous double bonds.
A nanomotor is a molecular or nanoscale device capable of converting energy into movement. It can typically generate forces on the order of piconewtons.
In physics, an entropic force acting in a system is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the entire system's statistical tendency to increase its entropy, rather than from a particular underlying force on the atomic scale.
In thermodynamics, entropy is often associated with the amount of order or disorder in a thermodynamic system. This stems from Rudolf Clausius' 1862 assertion that any thermodynamic process always "admits to being reduced [reduction] to the alteration in some way or another of the arrangement of the constituent parts of the working body" and that internal work associated with these alterations is quantified energetically by a measure of "entropy" change, according to the following differential expression:
In geometry, tetrahedron packing is the problem of arranging identical regular tetrahedra throughout three-dimensional space so as to fill the maximum possible fraction of space.
Self-propelled particles (SPP), also referred to as self-driven particles, are terms used by physicists to describe autonomous agents, which convert energy from the environment into directed or persistent motion. Natural systems which have inspired the study and design of these particles include walking, swimming or flying animals. Other biological systems include bacteria, cells, algae and other micro-organisms. Generally, self-propelled particles often refer to artificial systems such as robots or specifically designed particles such as swimming Janus colloids, bimetallic nanorods, nanomotors and walking grains. In the case of directed propulsion, which is driven by a chemical gradient, this is referred to as chemotaxis, observed in biological systems, e.g. bacteria quorum sensing and ant pheromone detection, and in synthetic systems, e.g. enzyme molecule chemotaxis and enzyme powered hard and soft particles.
Younan Xia is a Chinese-American chemist, materials scientist, and bioengineer. He is the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry, the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Michael Elmhirst Cates is a British physicist. He is the 19th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and has held this position since 1 July 2015. He was previously Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and has held a Royal Society Research Professorship since 2007.
Nanoparticles are classified as having at least one of its dimensions in the range of 1-100 nanometers (nm). The small size of nanoparticles allows them to have unique characteristics which may not be possible on the macro-scale. Self-assembly is the spontaneous organization of smaller subunits to form larger, well-organized patterns. For nanoparticles, this spontaneous assembly is a consequence of interactions between the particles aimed at achieving a thermodynamic equilibrium and reducing the system’s free energy. The thermodynamics definition of self-assembly was introduced by Professor Nicholas A. Kotov. He describes self-assembly as a process where components of the system acquire non-random spatial distribution with respect to each other and the boundaries of the system. This definition allows one to account for mass and energy fluxes taking place in the self-assembly processes.
A depletion force is an effective attractive force that arises between large colloidal particles that are suspended in a dilute solution of depletants, which are smaller solutes that are preferentially excluded from the vicinity of the large particles. One of the earliest reports of depletion forces that lead to particle coagulation is that of Bondy, who observed the separation or "creaming" of rubber latex upon addition of polymer depletant molecules to solution. More generally, depletants can include polymers, micelles, osmolytes, ink, mud, or paint dispersed in a continuous phase.
Monica Olvera de la Cruz is a Mexican born, American and French soft-matter theorist who is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry, and by courtesy Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Chemical and Biological Engineering, at Northwestern University.
Nicholas A. Kotov is the Irving Langmuir Distinguished Professor of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Prof. Nicholas Kotov demonstrated that the ability to self-organize into complex structures is the unifying property of all inorganic nanostructures. He has developed a family of bioinspired composite materials with a wide spectrum of properties that were previously unattainable in classical materials. These composite biomimetic materials are exemplified by his nacre-like ultrastrong yet transparent composites, enamel-like, stiff yet vibration-isolating composites, and cartilage-like membranes with both high strength and ion conductance.
Patchy particles are micron- or nanoscale colloidal particles that are anisotropically patterned, either by modification of the particle surface chemistry, through particle shape, or both. The particles have a repulsive core and highly interactive surfaces that allow for this assembly. The placement of these patches on the surface of a particle promotes bonding with patches on other particles. Patchy particles are used as a shorthand for modelling anisotropic colloids, proteins and water and for designing approaches to nanoparticle synthesis. Patchy particles range in valency from two or higher. Patchy particles of valency three or more experience liquid-liquid phase separation. Some phase diagrams of patchy particles do not follow the law of rectilinear diameters.
Many experimental realizations of self-propelled particles exhibit a strong tendency to aggregate and form clusters, whose dynamics are much richer than those of passive colloids. These aggregates of particles form for a variety of reasons, from chemical gradients to magnetic and ultrasonic fields. Self-propelled enzyme motors and synthetic nanomotors also exhibit clustering effects in the form of chemotaxis. Chemotaxis is a form of collective motion of biological or non-biological particles toward a fuel source or away from a threat, as observed experimentally in enzyme diffusion and also synthetic chemotaxis or phototaxis. In addition to irreversible schooling, self-propelled particles also display reversible collective motion, such as predator–prey behavior and oscillatory clustering and dispersion.
Collective motion is defined as the spontaneous emergence of ordered movement in a system consisting of many self-propelled agents. It can be observed in everyday life, for example in flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of animals and also in crowds and car traffic. It also appears at the microscopic level: in colonies of bacteria, motility assays and artificial self-propelled particles. The scientific community is trying to understand the universality of this phenomenon. In particular it is intensively investigated in statistical physics and in the field of active matter. Experiments on animals, biological and synthesized self-propelled particles, simulations and theories are conducted in parallel to study these phenomena. One of the most famous models that describes such behavior is the Vicsek model introduced by Tamás Vicsek et al. in 1995.
Anna Fontcuberta i Morral is a Spanish and Swiss physicist and materials scientist. Her research focuses on nanotechnology applied in the production of solar cells. She is a full professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the head of the Laboratory of Semiconductor Materials.
Sylvie Roke is a Dutch chemist and physicist specialized in photonics and aqueous systems. As a full professor she holds Julia Jacobi Chair of Photomedicine at EPFL and is the director of the Laboratory for fundamental BioPhotonics.
A microswimmer is a microscopic object with the ability to move in a fluid environment. Natural microswimmers are found everywhere in the natural world as biological microorganisms, such as bacteria, archaea, protists, sperm and microanimals. Since the turn of the millennium there has been increasing interest in manufacturing synthetic and biohybrid microswimmers. Although only two decades have passed since their emergence, they have already shown promise for various biomedical and environmental applications.
