Lab Groups

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.

The Gagliardi group develops novel quantum chemical methods and applies them to study phenomena related to sustainable energies, with special focus on chemical systems relevant to catalysis, spectroscopy, photochemistry, and gas separation. They are interested in modeling molecular species, materials, and interfaces.

The Galli Group develops and uses theoretical and computational methods to understand, predict, and engineer material properties from first principles. They investigate solids, liquids, and nanostructures in addition to physical and chemical processes relevant to solar energy conversion, water resources, and quantum information technologies.

Gardel Lab integrates approaches from soft condensed matter physics and molecular cell biology to study how mechanical forces are sensed, transmitted, and generated by animal cells. They are interested in understanding the basic physical principles underlying force transmission of the cytoskeleton and elucidating how these biophysical properties regulate cellular behaviors, especially cell adhesion and migration.

The Guha Lab focuses on new materials and systems for information processing and sensing. Current projects are on new oxide-based materials and devices for neuromorphic architectures and non-volatile memory, epitaxial rare earth oxide-based solid-state qubits on silicon platforms for quantum information science, cyberphysical sensor networks and sensor technologies for water and soil, and creating single-crystal films and three-dimensional structures on arbitrary substrates.

The High Lab studies optical and quantum science, exploring new methods to craft nanoscale interactions between light and solid-state systems. By doing so, they can fundamentally modify materials, for instance by breaking time-reversal symmetry or inducing long range coherence, and create deterministic, coherent interactions between single photons and quantum states. Their expertise integrates semiconductor physics, quantum optics, precision fabrication, plasmonics, and integrated photonics.

The Hsu Group designs, synthesizes, and fabricates materials for innovative light and heat management. With multidisciplinary approaches ranging from fundamental materials science to system-level mechanical engineering, they aim to perform transformative research that could make changes, big or small, to the world.

The Huang laboratory studies human immunology at the single-cell level, with foci in T cell recognition and differentiation. The Huang laboratory develops vaccines and adoptive cell therapies that target human cancer, infection, and autoimmune diseases by engineering mRNA nanomedicines and T cell/chimeric antigen receptors (TCRs/CARs).

The Jiang Group investigates quantum control and quantum error correction to protect quantum information from decoherence for various physical platforms, with potential applications for quantum sensing, quantum transduction, quantum communication, and quantum computation.

The Chen lab’s interest is to apply next-generation technologies (e.g. human pluripotent stem cell-based modeling, organotypic tissue engineering by de- / re-cellularization and single-cell analysis) to pursue long-standing questions in cancer research, stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, especially in an era in which stem cell technology, disease modeling, and genomics are approaching a new level of sophistication.