Lab Groups

When material dimensions reach the nanometer scale, quantum mechanical and thermodynamic properties that are insignificant in larger, everyday materials dominate, causing these nanomaterials to display new and interesting properties. Our work seeks to understand these properties and exploit them for technological applications.

The Amanchukwu Lab’s mission is to creatively solve energy-related challenges, especially focused on energy storage and electrocatalysis. Within energy storage and electrocatalytic devices, electrolytes are a vital component that support ionic and molecular transport. The Amanchukwu Lab is focused on the design and synthesis of novel electrolyte media (solid state and liquid), and the study of electrolyte instability and ionic transport phenomena for applications in batteries and electrocatalysis.

The Awschalom Group has active research activities in optical and magnetic interactions in semiconductor quantum structures, spin dynamics and coherence in condensed matter systems (“spintronics”), macroscopic quantum phenomena in nanometer-scale magnets, and implementations of quantum information and sensing in the solid state.

The Chevrier Lab aims to uncover the general rules governing how successful immune responses work to stop an infection or remove diseased cells, while keeping the host healthy at the end of the process. They emphasize a multiscale approach that parallels the organization of the immune system across the body from molecules and cells to tissues to the whole organism. By creating new tools and approaches, they study how interactions occur between immunological components across these scales to uncover fundamental concepts in immunology and beyond.

The Cleland Lab is developing superconducting, mechanical, and optomechanical structures for applications to quantum information. Applying the tools of advanced lithographic processing to a wide range of materials, they can design and build superconducting qubit circuits with excellent quantum coherence; mechanical devices with operating frequencies in the microwave band; and structures that convert signals between microwave and infrared optical frequencies.

The Clerk Group is broadly interested in a variety of driven-dissipative quantum phenomena occurring in engineered quantum systems. Its research is at the intersection of condensed matter physics, quantum optics, and quantum information. While Clerk Group is composed of theorists, they work closely with a number of leading experimental groups around the world.

The de Pablo Group investigates the physics and thermodynamics of complex materials using statistical mechanics, molecular simulations, and machine learning. Using the results, they design new systems for technological applications.

The Engel Group strives to exploit femtosecond dynamics to steer and to control excited state reactivity. They use a combination of ultrafast spectroscopy, theory, synthesis, and biophysics to approach this problem.

The Esser-Kahn Group’s research interests lie at the intersection of biology, chemistry, and materials science, with a belief in using the tools from each discipline for the task at hand. The group’s current research focuses on three projects: working toward microvascular thermal and gaseous exchange units, creating materials for reprogramming the immune system, and working towards creating synthetic tissue scaffolds.

The Ferguson Lab’s research interests lie broadly in the investigation of equilibrium and dynamic properties of soft matter, with specific foci in the self-assembly of biological and bio-inspired materials, machine-learning accelerated molecular dynamics, inference of protein folding landscapes from experimental data, and the reconstruction of viral fitness landscapes for computational vaccine design.