Abhijeet Joshi

Abhijeet Joshi, originally from India, received his BTech degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a research assistant for Professor Juan de Pablo. His initial research involved studying liquid crystal (LC) aqueous interfaces and the effect of ions on these interfaces. Currently, he is working on developing first-principles based methods to calculate elastic constants of liquid crystals using atomistic models. These include the standard splay, twist, and bend elastic constants, and the often-ignored but important saddle-splay elastic constant. These studies might help us understand peculiar morphologies observed in liquid-crystalline material within different confinements. Understanding bipolar to radial phase transition within LC nano-droplets is one such example.