Lecturers
Lecturers
Michael Rubinstein
Title and Affiliation:
John P. Barker Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lecture title:
Lecture title: Super-Soft and Super-Elastic Networks
Short autobiography:
Michael Rubinstein is John P. Barker Distinguished Professor at the Department of Chemistry at, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been on the faculty at UNC since 1995 following 10 years at Kodak Research Laboratories, post-doctoral fellowship at Bell Labs, and a PhD from Physics Department at Harvard. Rubinstein’s research interests are in the area of theoretical soft condensed matter physics with an emphasis on polymer physics. His main scientific contributions include theories of polymer entanglements, dynamics of reversible networks, and models of charged polymers. His recent scientific interests are in applications of polymer physics to biological systems, such as airway surface layer of a lung and development of molecular models of polymer gels and networks including those with self-healing properties.
In 2003 he published a textbook “Polymer Physics” (together with Ralph H. Colby from Penn State University) that became very popular and is currently used as a standard textbook in many universities world-wide. He is the winner of APS Polymer Physics Prize, served as the Chair of Polymer Physics Division of APS, and is Chair of Editorial Board of “Soft Matter”.
Research Interests:
-entangled polymer networks and gels (non-linear elasticity, self-healing, diffusion of particles through them, etc.)
-applications of polymer and soft matter physics to biology
-charged polymers including friction between polymer brushes
Date of Presentation: 2014/11/11