People
Simon Rogers
(217) 333-0020
Professor, James W. Westwater Professorial Scholar
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Ph.D. Physics, MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnologies,
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2011
“The Ageing and Rejuvenation of Soft, Glassy Complex Fluids”
Advisor: Prof. Sir Paul Terence Callaghan
POST DOCS
GRADUATE TRAINEES
Research interests: aging, nonlinear rheology, yielding, LAOS, recovery rheology
Hobbies: baking, scrapbooking, sewing, embroidery, thrifting
Email: dcolla3@illinois.edu
Research interests: Brittle and ductile yield stress fluids and recovery rheology
Hobbies: road trips and cooking
Email: jiye2@illinois.edu
Research interests: soft glassy rheology, gelation, mesoscopic models, and recovery rheology
Hobbies: fantasy/sci-fi books, anime, gaming, cooking, badminton and Mclaren f1
Email: aspuri2@illinois.edu
Research interests: dynamic covalent networks, polymer synthesis, polymer rheology, recovery rheology
Hobbies: video games, reading, and swimming
Email: sk177@illinois.edu
Research interests: thixotropy, memory in soft materials, recovery rheology, and rheoXPCS
Hobbies: rock climbing, baking, and reading
Email: kovakas2@illinois.edu
Research interests: elastomers, recovery rheology, LAOS, and psychorheology
Hobbies: felting and drawing
Email: soyoony2@illinois.edu
Research interests: polymer viscoelasticity, time-temperature superposition, retardation spectra
Hobbies: video games, watching NBA and soccer, hiking and watching movies
Email: yusifov2@illinois.edu
⠀
UNDERGRADUATE TRAINEES
Elizabeth Miczuga is an undergraduate researcher who previously worked with Jimmy and is now independent.
David Tapp is an undergraduate researcher working with Aniket Puri.
VISITORS
Eunho Cho is currently a visiting graduate student.
ALUMNI
Jimmy Griebler researched furthering our understanding of yielding fluids. A yielding fluid is typically a soft material which transitions from solid-like behavior to liquid-like behavior above a specific stress or strain threshold. Yielding fluids are ubiquitous in our lives, from cosmetics, to food, as well as industrial processes. Yielding behavior can be seen in things such as avalanches and mudslides as well. Jimmy developed new testing protocols to probe the recoverable and unrecoverable nature of yielding fluids, as well as working with others in the group to further our understanding of constitutive models for yielding materials.
Jiachun Shi’s work involved understanding the flow behaviors of different branched polymers in highly nonlinear industrial processes to help optimize plastics forming operations and introduce more interesting mechanical properties to final products. The goal of her project was to correlate the architectures of branched polymers to their rheological behaviors in nonlinear operations. Current focuses are performing oscillatory shear recovery tests on different branched polymers and carrying out theoretical analysis to provide insights further. Besides testing different branched polymers, she also worked on analyzing the nonlinear rheology of the wormlike micelles. Jiachun is now working at 3M.
John de Bruyn spent some of his sabbatical in our lab in the summer of 2017, visiting from the the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. John is an expert in yield stress fluids, and the physics of fluids in general. His research is mostly in the area of experimental condensed matter physics, and centers on soft materials, the physics of biological systems, and the dynamics of systems driven out of equilibrium.
Krutarth Kamani researched the yielding behavior of soft materials. Materials that show yielding behavior are used in many applications such as 3-D printing, petroleum and chemical processing, cosmetics, and food processing. Their crucial design feature is the capability to show a range of behaviors such as solid-like when left alone and fluid-like under high loading conditions. Krutarth has combined theoretical and experimental techniques based on recovery rheology to develop a model that captures these materials’ transient and steady-state behavior during a range of commonly observed rheological protocols. Krutarth is now working at PPG Industries.
Eric Burgeson‘s doctoral research focused on psychorheology, which studies how people perceive rheological behavior of materials. Traditional rheological metrics tend to focus on the steady state behavior of these materials while human perception operates on instantaneous to short responses. As a result, there is a disconnect between what rheologists measure and the real feelings that people report. Eric worked on methods and metrics that closed the gap between traditional and perceived rheology through modelling, experiments, and statistical analyses. Eric is now working at Celanese.
Yul Hui Shim researched direct ink writing (DIW) printing to fabricate 3D structures and worked on rheological protocols that can provide guidelines for this. She studied the rheological transitions with yield stress fluids, which could potentially be applied to various processes accompanying shear such as printing, coating, and spinning. Yul Hui is now an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Suwon, South Korea.
Matt Wade studied bottlebrush polymers. Bottlebrush polymers are a set of novel materials characterized by densely packed polymer sidechains connected to a single backbone, resulting in a in a semi-stiff cylindrical macromolecule. These materials exhibit a range of physical properties depending on the processing conditions, thus making them interesting from a 3D printing perspective. My research seeks to characterize the viscoelastic properties of bottlebrush polymers with varying geometries and compositions through transient and out-of-equilibrium rheological techniques. Various scattering techniques are used to identify the physical structure of these polymers while under conditions stresses similar to those experienced during 3D printing.
Piyush Singh studied the underlying fundamental processes in self-stratifying coatings i.e. smart coatings with the aim of developing novel and advanced functional materials based on this approach. He also worked toward developing advanced experimental techniques and theoretical frameworks for nonlinear shear rheology, aimed at developing structure-property-processing relationships for a wide variety of materials.
Gavin Donley‘s doctoral research was on yield stress fluids. Yield stress fluid is a type of soft material which exhibits a transition between solid-like elastic extension and liquid-like flow at a specific stress. Examples of yield stress fluids include toothpaste, shaving cream, mayonnaise, and drilling fluids, to name just a few. Gavin has combined analyses, theory, and experiments to design novel time-resolved rheometric methods for probing the yielding transition.
Jiho Choi‘s doctoral research was on thixotropic suspensions and performing novel experiments that map the stresses and strains during deformation. Jiho worked on unifying metrics used to understand oscillatory shearing, and developed protocols for how best to obtain consistent data from time-dependent materials. Jiho is an award-winning rheologist, having won a poster prize at the Society of Rheology’s 90th Annual Meeting, held in Houston in 2018. Jiho is now working at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology.
Johnny Lee‘s doctoral research focused on polymer rheology and self-assembly. He developed new experimental protocols using rheometry to search for polymer topology-rheology relationships that act as more precise tests of proposed theories. Beyond bulk rheology, small angle scattering (SALS and SANS) techniques are also used to relate rheological results to the microstructure of these polymeric materials. Johnny was awarded the Neutron Scattering Society of America’s Outstanding Student Research prize in 2020. Johnny is now working in the rheology group at Corteva.
Jun Dong Park was an integral part of the group from August of 2016 until February of 2019. JD was the group’s first post-doc, and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Sookmyung Women’s University in his native South Korea.
Jiseong Jeong was an undergraduate researcher working with Krutarth from 2022 – 2023 on understanding yielding across a range of protocols.
Eden Li was an undergraduate researcher working with Matt on the characterization of bottlebrush polymers from 2021 – 2023.
Mikah Favis was an undergraduate researcher who worked with Matt on understanding concentrated suspensions of bottlebrush di-block copolymers from 2019 – 2020.
Victoria Wisniewski was an undergraduate researcher who worked with Gavin on developing methods for expanding frequency sweep information via chirp rheology, and using strain-shift measurements to better understand yielding from 2017 – 2020.
Shiv Patel was an undergraduate researcher who worked with Jiho on making transient measurements on thixotropic suspensions in 2018 – 2019.
Taha Mohamed was an undergraduate researcher who worked with JD on colloidal glasses in 2018.
Emmanuel Akanbi was an undergraduate researcher in the lab from 2016 – 2018 and worked on stress jumps in thixotropic colloidal suspensions.
Dawna Peterson was an undergraduate researcher in the lab from 2016 – 2018 and worked on colloidal gels taken out of equilibrium via large amplitude oscillatory shearing.
Ugonna Oduocha was an undergraduate researcher in the lab from 2016 – 2018 who submitted his senior thesis on experimental and population balance modelling of colloidal gels under LAOS.
Yasmin Abumaye was an undergraduate researcher in the lab in 2017.
Aza Walker was an undergraduate researcher in the lab in 2016.