Talk
Patten Seminar: S. Lisa Biswal
When
· 2:45 PM MST
Shown in the venue’s time zone (America/Denver), not yours.
Where
Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotec Building, A108
Boulder, CO
Tickets
No on-sale date recorded
This event came from a public calendar feed. Calendar feeds publish when a show happens, not when its tickets go on sale — so this is genuinely unknown rather than zero, and rather than “already on sale”.
What the source said
Speaker: S. Lisa Biswal, William M. McCardell Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University, Houston, Texas Seminar: Programmable Colloidal Assemblies: Designing Dynamic Matter with Magnetic Fields Hosts: Rob Davis and Ankur Gupta Abstract Colloidal particles provide a versatile model system for understanding how interactions, structure, and dynamics produce material behavior. More importantly, when their interactions can be controlled in real time, colloids can serve as reconfigurable building blocks for adaptive materials and microscale devices. My group uses time-varying magnetic fields to direct the assembly and motion of superparamagnetic colloids, creating structures whose morphology, mechanics, and function can be dynamically programmed. I will first describe how rotating magnetic fields drive colloidal particles into nonequilibrium states with collective behavior reminiscent of molecular fluids. These systems exhibit dynamic clustering and steady-state vapor–liquid coexistence despite their continuous energy input. By adapting concepts such as Kelvin’s equation, we can define an effective vapor pressure and connect driven colloidal matter to ideas from equilibrium statistical mechanics. I will then introduce magnetically tunable colloidal chains assembled from DNA-linked paramagnetic particles. These model filaments have programmable bending stiffness over several orders of magnitude and provide a platform for studying the interplay among elasticity, hydrodynamic forces, and external driving. Under dynamic fields, the chains buckle, coil, translate, and reorganize into complex structures and motions. Together, these examples illustrate how magnetic fields can transform colloids from passive “big atoms” into responsive components for programmable soft matter. This approach creates opportunities to design adaptive microfluidic elements for mixing, transport, particle capture, and interfacial manipulation, while also revealing new physical principles governing matter far from equilibrium. Biosketch Lisa Biswal is the William M. McCardell Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. At Rice, she leads the Soft Matter Engineering Laboratory, where her research focuses on understanding the rheological behavior of particulate and multiphase systems and connecting macroscopic properties to the underlying physics of colloidal assemblies, surfactant-stabilized foams and emulsions, and energy-storage composites. Her honors include an NSF CAREER Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and more recently the 2025 Rice University’s Provost’s Outstanding Doctoral Mentor Award. She is also an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.