Kathleen Stebe

Biographie:
Kathleen J. Stebe is the Goodwin Professor in the School Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Educated at the City College of New York, she received a B.A. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the Levich Institute advised by Charles Maldarelli. After a post-doctoral year in Compiegne, France under the guidance of Dominique Barthes-Biesel, she joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where she became Professor and served as the department chair. Thereafter, she joined the University of Pennsylvania, where she served in various administrative capacities including department chair and Deputy Dean. She has been recognized by the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, and as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Radcliffe Institute. Her research focuses on directed assembly in soft matter and at fluid interfaces, with an emphasis on confinement, geometry, and emergent structures in far from equilibrium settings for novel functional materials.

The Stebe lab is interested in complex fluids, often in settings that are far from equilibrium from a fundamental and engineering viewpoint. In one aspect of her work, she studies the mechanics of fluid interfaces in the presence of surface active molecules to harness interfaces for applications ranging from enhanced transport to materials assembly to rare earth element separation. She is also deeply interested in complex structures which form on fluid interfaces, including nanoparticle-polyelectrolyte films, protein monolayers, bacterial biofilms, and particle-laden fluid interfaces. Finally, a major effort in her research group focuses on developing strategies for soft reconfigurable systems by molding director fields and topological defects in confined liquid crystals. Throughout, the Stebe group uses fundamental arguments to develop strategies to direct system to address societal needs.

Titre de la communication:
Bio-inspired Reconfigurable Matter by Swimmers in Nematic Liquid Crystals