Seminar: Building Polyhedra by Self-Assembly

Topic: A fascinating direction in materials science is the biomimetic use of self-assembly as a paradigm for microfabrication of complex three dimensional structures. In the past ten years, basic geometric shapes, in particular polyhedra have been built in many ingenious experiments on scales ranging from 1nm-- 1 mm.  However, there are few principles that guide the a priori design of self-assembling systems. A common obstruction is the need to search within a large space of possible configurations. I will describe our work on one such design problem for surface tension driven "self-folding polyhedra".

Bio: Dr. Govind Menon is a professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. He received his B.S. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 1994, his M.S. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University in 1996, and his Ph.D in Applied Mechanics from Brown University in 2001. He worked as scientist at Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI-MIS), in Leipzig, Germany from 2000-2001. He is currently a Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University working in the area of mathematical physics, in particular kinetics of phase transitions, integrable systems, statistical theories of turbulence, and biological nanotechnology.