Research Overview

At the demarcating boundary between immiscible fluid phases, adsorbed molecular or mesoscopic entities – such as surfactants, polymers, proteins or particles – confer two-dimensional ordered structures, mediated through mutual interactions among the entities, spanning across decades of length-scales. These, referred to as Soft Interfaces, possess vast degrees of freedom that can be tuned by weakly applied fields (e.g., thermal, acoustic, electromagnetic, etc.). Depending on composition and concentration, the network confers emergent attributes – perceived as catalytic, optical, sensing or mechanical properties – to associate structure to function. This is the basis of functional materials. By wrapping or repeating arrays of interfaces, as in foams or emulsions, it is possible to create complex bulk materials.

To move towards sustainable, efficient creation of functional materials it is crucial to develop fundamentals-to-applications approaches across the nascent, intermediary to applied stages to reduce reliance on conventional ad-hoc, top-down strategies that are energetically and materially inefficient. To this end, my aim is to develop technological platforms for simultaneous in-situ assembly and characterisation of complex interfaces, having prescribed material and reactionary properties, for diverse applications ranging across catalysis, biomedical interventions or as hierarchical materials.

Specifically, the goal is to
(i) experimentally explore the dominant length-scales and time-scales in complex materials;
(ii) comprehend their relations;
(iii) utilise them as nodes to direct their spatio-temporal evolution.
The knowledge will be utilised in engineering dynamic systems having programmable characters.

To be brief, the aim is to acquire knowledge from first principles – not to iterate it – to engineer materials to solve problems that distress our future.
To quote: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” – Richard P. Feynman.