Congratulations to Shab on her successful PhD defense on Friday! “Wear mechanisms of chemically crosslinked hydrogels under mild abrasion”

Hydrogels are the next “engineering material” that we need new textbooks for, to teach the next generation of engineers to design with them. Shabnam’s work contributes directly to that, and over the past 4 years she has discovered that the material nature of the hydrogel determines how it wears away — sometimes it acts brittle, and sometimes ductile. In just the past year, she also assembled and proved a nice theory that surface wear is a collection of micro-fractures: the energy required for fracture is strongly correlated with the surface wear. Congratulations again Shab!