Prof. Ethayaraja Mani's Talk

Start
Oct 26, 2022 - 14:30
End
Oct 26, 2022 - 15:30
Venue
Room LC 102 in the lecture hall complex
Event Type
Speaker
Prof. Ethayaraja Mani, Associate Professor Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras
Title
Collective dynamics of active Brownian colloids

Abstract:
Active matter is an assembly of active agents, each of which consumes energy to move, and intrinsically it is in an out-of-equilibrium state. Examples of such systems in nature include, in the order of decreasing size, bacteria, cells, zooplanktons, insects, birds, and fish shoals.  How- ever, studying complex systems such as biological systems suffers from the drawback of having no individual control over their elements and thus often requires developing coarse-grained models theoretically. It is helpful to investigate model systems with a simple activity for elucidating the physical essence of such a unique out-of- equilibrium state of active/driven matter. With this motivation, I shall present numerical results related to collective dynamics active Brownian particles for a range of model active systems. These results elucidate the role of inter-particle interactions, self-propulsion speed, angular speed, rotational diffusivity, active-passive composition and hydrodynamics on dynamic clustering and phase transitions.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Ethayaraja Mani is an associate professor of Chemical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He obtained BTech degree in Chemical Engineering from Coimbatore Institute of Technology in 2003 and PhD from IIT-Bombay in 2009. He did a postdoc at Utrecht University, The Netherlands for two years (Aug 2008 - July 2010) and at University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands for more than a year (Aug 2011 - Oct 2011). He joined IIT-Madras in Nov 2011 as assistant professor in the department of Chemical Engineering.

His research interests are experimental and computation soft matter including Pickering emulsions, self-assembly, protein aggregation, nanoscience, active matter, polymer-nanoparticle composites, etc. He is the recipient of DAAD exchange fellowships to University of Dusseldorf (2014) and Technical University of Berlin (2015). He is also the recipient of Fulbright-Nehru fellowship in 2019 for visiting University of Michigan. He was awarded R. G. Manudhane best PhD thesis award, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT– Bombay, (2009), Shah-Schulman Best PhD thesis award (2009), Young Faculty Recognition Award (2014), Amar Dye Chem Award (2016), and Institute Research and Development Early-Career Award (2022).