ME PhD Thesis Defense- Gregory Snyder

April 24, 9:00am - 11:00am
Mānoa Campus, Holmes Hall 287 and over Zoom

Abstract Soft materials, including colloids, polymers, and biological assemblies, exhibit complex self-organization driven by weak, highly tunable interactions. Their ability to form structures across length scales makes them central to the study of self-assembly and materials design. Within this class, patchy particles provide a coarse-grained, minimal, and highly tunable model for directional interactions, retaining only essential features, such as building-block geometry and binding specificity. These particles can be engineered to assemble into targets ranging from finite clusters to bulk crystals, spanning synthetic colloids and biological analogs such as viral capsids. Despite this flexibility, the design space is effectively unbounded, yielding a high-dimensional landscape that can be systematically explored using inverse design techniques. Although prior work has developed frameworks for targeted assembly, the interplay between key design parameters remains poorly understood. Here, we address this gap using differentiable molecular dynamics with JAX-MD. We show that the design landscape is governed by structural floppiness, and that stiff and sloppy parameter directions can be identified through Hessian analysis of the full optimization space. Zoom: https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/87957275033 Meeting ID: 879 5727 5033 Passcode: 781079


Event Sponsor
Mechanical Engineering, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Samantha Kawamoto, 8089567167, sk247@hawaii.edu, Thesis Defense Announcement (PDF)

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