Statement

I value being part of the community of scholars that are The Society of Rheology (SoR), and I look forward to this opportunity to give back. My goals as vice-president are for SoR to continue and expand as an inspiring and supportive environment for excellence in rheology. Rheology has become a critical tool for characterizing, understanding and designing materials in a broad range of fields, from tissue engineering to 3D printing of buildings. Rapid and inexpensive rheological characterization is also becoming the cornerstone of automated and AI-aided materials formulation. SoR can ensure its continued vitality by actively engaging and supporting researchers and industry in these and other new areas that rely on rheology through its annual meetings, short courses, and the Journal of Rheology. I will also work toward increased participation by industry to strengthen its interactions with academia and national labs. Further, SoR must continue its efforts to ensure a diverse, international community from all walks of life and all career stages. The overall result of these efforts will be an even more vibrant and impactful SoR.

Biography

Dr. Roger T. Bonnecaze is interim dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering and holds the William and Bettye Nowlin Chair of Engineering in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). He received his B.S. (‘85) from Cornell University and his M.S. (‘87) and Ph.D. (‘91) from the California Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering. Between his M.S. and Ph.D., Roger was a project manager for Hydro Research Science working on environmental fluid mechanics and designing and testing hydraulic structures. After a BP Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, Roger joined the faculty at UT in 1993. He was chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 2005-2013. The end of his tenure as chair coincided with his successful bid for the National Science Foundation NASCENT Nanomanufacturing Engineering Research Center. As co-director for seven years, he worked on and organized research with colleagues from several disciplines, engaged industrial partners in the Center’s research and entrepreneurial activities, and coordinated the Center’s educational programs for students at UT and the Austin community. Recently, Roger launched SandBox Semiconductor, a start-up company spun out of the Center based on research by one of his Ph.D. students, who is now the CEO.

Roger’s research interests include modeling and simulation of complex fluids and the mechanics of nanomanufacturing. He has received the NSF Young Investigator Award, David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, AIChE Thomas Baron Award, two Journal of Rheology and one Rheologica Acta Publication Awards, and several teaching awards. Roger is a Fellow of The Society of Rheology, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served and chaired the Metzner Award and Fellows Committees of the SoR. Roger is co-organizing the 2024 Fall SoR Meeting in Austin (moved from Winter 2021 due to the pandemic).

Jonathan P. Rothstein is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He has served The Society of Rheology in a number of capacities over the years. He has co-organized the technical session of 2011 SoR Annual Meeting. He has been a member of the SoR Education Committee since 2011 and its Chair from 2014-2018. In 2014, he co-developed a K12 Outreach Event for The Society of Rheology called “Panta Rei – Everything Flows,” which has been held annually ahead of the SoR’s Annual Meeting. More recently, he has developed a series of outreach kits along with instruction guides and tutorial videos to facilitate participation in rheology-based outreach activities. For his outreach activities, Prof. Rothstein was honored with an Outstanding Service Award from The Society of Rheology in 2019. For the last two years, Prof. Rothstein has been a Member at Large for The Society of Rheology and a member of the Executive Committee.

Prof. Rothstein received his Bachelors of Engineering from the Cooper Union in 1996. From there he completed his MS at Harvard University in 1998 before getting his PhD from MIT in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 under the supervision of Gareth McKinley. He joined the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts in 2001 and has been a visiting faculty at KU Leuven in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2007 and again in 2015. He has the distinction of having won both an NSF CAREER Award in 2006 and an ONR YIP Award. He has been recognized within the College of Engineering at UMASS with the Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015, the Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 2007 and the Outstanding Senior Faculty Award in 2020. He was the first recipient of Metzner Early Career Award in 2007 from The Society of Rheology. He has won a number of other prestigious awards including the Frenkiel Award from American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS/DFD) in 2002 and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2003.

His current research program focuses on the dynamics of complex fluids. Among other areas, his research has made a significant impact in the fields of non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, shear and extensional rheology, elastic flow instabilities, Marangoni flows, superhydrophobic surfaces, turbulent and laminar drag reduction, microfluidics, dynamics of wormlike micelle solutions, and polymer processing. He has co-authored more over 100 archival journal publications and is currently a member of the Editorial Board on the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Dynamics.

In running for vice president of The Society of Rheology, my goal is to continue to give back to an organization that has been an integral part of my professional career for the last 20 years. The Society of Rheology is a vibrant research community of world-class scholars that has prospered for nearly a hundred years. Taking The Society of Rheology into its next century will require navigating many challenges. My focus will be on expanding the reach and the membership of The Society of Rheology through education and outreach activities, recruitment of young scholars and the reestablishment of connections with rheological researchers in industry. The strength of our society is the people within it.

I have been conducting rheological research at NIST for the past 25 years and currently lead the Polymer Additive Manufacturing and Rheology project. Throughout my career, my primary interest has been the measurement of non-equilibrium phenomena in soft matter, with interests in diverse areas such as liquid crystal dynamics, polymer slippage, confined emulsions and more recently crystallization and additive manufacturing. I have found that a rheological perspective is the key aspect of any problem that involves flow and deformation of a complex material and believe that the concepts and tools that emerge from the rheological community should find broad applicability in industrial applications.

The Society of Rheology has been my primary professional home for many years. I love its openness, collegiality, and all the flavors of rheology. Its focus on engaging and affordable meetings, student involvement, international outreach and stewardship of the premier rheological journal – all led by volunteers - make this a truly unique society.

Volunteering time for the Society is highly rewarding and worthwhile, and I have been happy to serve in various roles over the years. Recently I lead the DC team that organized the 2015 Baltimore meeting (remember the aquarium party?) and served as Technical Co-chair for the lovely February meeting in Tampa.

Chris’ love of Rheology started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D in Chemistry in 1994. For the next three years, Chris studied under previous Society of Rheology treasurer, Montgomery Shaw. Chris accepted a National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in 1997 that brought him to NIST in the Polymers Division where he worked on the rheology of thin film polymers for integrated electronics. Chris moved to his current position with the Engineering Laboratory two years later applied his rheological background to the problem of predicting how polymers change when exposed to outdoor weathering. Chris has been involved in a wide range of research projects related to different aspects of rheology, examples include research on the fundamentals of adhesion loss related to changes in relative humidity, developing working equations for the quartz crystal microbalance, building test methods for spray applied fire resistive materials for structural building elements. In addition, he has managed projects for the Department of Homeland Security on exploring explosive force mitigation within the mass transit system, or projects for the Housing and Urban Development on the degradation of building materials. Dr. White’s research involves close industry collaboration; he has managed research agreements with an average of 15 companies/year for the last 20+ years. Chris is also involved in the development of industry consensus standards and has championed many adopted standards.

Dr. White received an MBA in 2007 from the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Chris has used that degree to start and develop several small businesses. A current venture can be found at Bee-America.com. Chris was also asked to be an adjunct professor for the Smith School and teach courses in Leadership, Project Management and Ethical Behavior in both the Masters of Telecommunications and MBA programs.

Chris has been an active member of The Society of Rheology since 1988. He is the current treasurer and has served since taking over for Monty at the 2015 meeting in Baltimore. As treasurer, Chris is an ex-officio member of the financial advisory committee and audit committee. He has also previously served on the membership committee including a term as chair. Chris was also a local co-organizer of the 2001 Bethesda and 2015 Baltimore meetings.

Ralph H. Colby received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 1979. After working for two years at the General Electric Company in rheology research and process development, he attended graduate school at Northwestern University, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1983 and 1985. Graduate research focused on rheology of linear polybutadiene melts and solutions, and included 15 months as a visiting scholar in the Exxon Research and Engineering Company, Corporate Research - Science Laboratories. He then worked for ten years at the Eastman Kodak Company in their Corporate Research Laboratories. Rheology research areas over these ten years included linear polymer melts and solutions, miscible polymer blends, block copolymers, randomly branched polymers, polymer gels, liquid crystalline polymers, polyelectrolytes, proteins, surfactants and colloidal suspensions.

In 1995, Dr. Colby was hired as an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University and was promoted to Professor in 2000. He teaches very demanding undergraduate courses on Polymer Rheology and Processing and continues to use rheological and dielectric experiments to probe the dynamics of polymers, ionomers, nanocomposites and other complex fluids. Dr. Colby has over 180 publications, published a textbook Polymer Physics in 2003 and has published seven review articles. He was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand in 2005 and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London in 2012. In 2011 Dr. Colby became the Editor of the Journal of Rheology and he was the 2012 recipient of The Society of Rheology’s Bingham Medal.

At Penn State, research has focused on polyelectrolyte solutions (more than 30 papers), miscible polymer blend dynamics (more than 20 papers) and ionomers (more than 30 papers). Dr. Colby is a recognized leader in liquid state dynamics of polymers and ions, as evidenced by more than 50 invited talks in the last five years, mostly international.

Current research focuses on DFT design (with Mike Janik and Ismaila Dabo) of polar ionomers for optimal ion transport of single-ion conductors; their subsequent synthesis and characterization using X-ray scattering (with Karen Winey at UPenn) to assess the structure, linear viscoelasticity to assess the mechanical properties and dielectric spectroscopy (with Jim Runt) to assess the ion transport properties. This effort was funded for seven years by DOE-BES (five faculty and ten Ph.D. students for which Dr. Colby was the PI) and for five years by a US Army MURI (eight faculty and twenty Ph.D. students, centered at Virginia Tech). Currently this topic is funded by NSF-DMR and Dr. Colby’s students have recently made block copolymer ionomers with 10 MPa modulus and reasonable ionic conductivity near room temperature.

New research areas include flow-induced crystallization of semi-crystalline polymer melts (with Scott Milner and Alicyn Rhoades), characterization of semi-flexible polymers including P3HT that is important for polymer-based photovoltaics (with Enrique Gomez) and solutions of native cellulose in ionic liquids that allow fiber spinning to achieve the true strength of cellulose without the usual chemical modifications that reduce hydrogen bonding and crystallinity. If history repeats itself, one or more of these three new seeds will become the focus of research in the Colby group for the next ten years.

Thibaut Divoux is a research associate at CNRS with an appointment at the Physics Laboratory at ENS Lyon in France since 2020. He was first appointed at the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal in 2012 before being transferred to the CNRS-MIT Laboratory in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT in 2016. Thibaut is an active member of the French, European and American Societies of rheology, and he serves the community as a delegate of the individual members on the European Society of Rheology Committee since 2018.

Thibaut received his Bachelors in Physics in 2004 from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He completed his MS at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2006 before getting his Ph.D. from ENS Lyon in 2009. He succeeded (top 2%) in the prestigious French competitive exam known as the “Agrégation de physique” and was a lecturer for five years at ENS Lyon. He joined CNRS in 2012 and has been a visiting faculty at UC Berkeley in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2013, and at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2015-2016, and Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2016-2020. He was selected as a distinguished EPJ referee in 2013, and he was the first French recipient of the Metzner Early Career Award in 2018 from The Society of Rheology.

He has a longstanding expertise in the rheology of Soft Glassy Materials, with a strong emphasis on materials relevant for industrial use. His current research interests include shear-induced memory effects in gels, and the determination of precursors to failure during creep and fatigue tests in soft solids. He has co-authored more than 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals and contributed over 95 reviews, mainly for Phys. Rev. Lett., J. Rheol., Soft Matter, Phys. Rev. E, and J. Fluid Mech.

See also https://www.divouxlab.cnrs.fr/

Randy H. Ewoldt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has been a member of The Society of Rheology for over 16 years and is honored to be nominated to serve as a Member at Large.

His prior service to the SoR includes being Technical Program Co-Chair for the 2017 meeting in Denver where he and fellow Co-Chair Anne Grillet created the Gallery of Rheology as a venue for visually striking images produced by our community. He also co-created with Jeff Giacomin a short course on large-amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) for SoR, delivered at the 2013 meeting in Montreal, which included coordination with instrument manufacturers to provide hands-on tutorials on the topic. In service to the broader rheology community, he regularly contributes to rheology short courses hosted at the University of Minnesota and various locations in the USA (lead by Chris Macosko) since 2009, and is a regular contributor to the KU Leuven rheology short course in Belgium (currently lead by Christian Clasen) since 2013.

Ewoldt received his Ph.D. (2009) and M.S. (2006) from MIT, and B.S. (2004) from Iowa State University, all in Mechanical Engineering. His postdoctoral training (2009-2011) was at the University of Minnesota affiliated with the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. He conducts fundamental research in fluid mechanics and rheology.

His group studies the rheology of thixotropic yield stress fluids, polymer gels, and biological materials, develops new rheometry measurement methods including for large- and medium-amplitude oscillatory shear (MAOS), and creates new design tools motivated by applications in 3D printing, fire suppression, and other creative uses of rheological complexity. His research has been recognized by awards from NSF (CAREER/PECASE), ASME, 3M, DuPont, TA Instruments, and The Society of Rheology (Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award). His teaching has been recognized by awards from his department, college, and alumni of UIUC. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Grainger College of Engineering, the UIUC Conference on Conduct Governance, and the UIUC Faculty Advisory Committee. He serves as an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics (since 2015) and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Physics of Fluids (since 2017). He is a member of the SoR, APS, and ASME.

Ravi Prakash Jagadeeshan is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Monash University, Australia, where he has worked since 2001. He received a BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1981, an MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Akron in 1983, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science in 1989. He was a postdoc with R. A. Mashelkar at NCL Pune (1990-91), Sam Edwards at the Cavendish Lab, Cambridge (1991-93), and Hans Christian Oettinger at ETH Zürich (1993-94). Between 1994 and 1999, he was an Assistant Professor at IIT Madras. Prior to joining Monash University, he was a Humboldt fellow in the Technical University at Kaiserslautern, Germany between 1999 and 2000.

His research is focussed on gaining an understanding of the intricate coupling between phenomena on the scale of polymer molecules and the macroscopic rheological behaviour exhibited by polymer solutions. An overarching theme in his research is to take advantage of the existence of universal behaviour in polymer solutions, independent of the chemistry of the monomer. In particular, his work aims to show how universality can be exploited to make quantitative predictions with Brownian dynamics simulations, based on simple coarse-grained models for the polymer. His work in these areas has been recognised by election as a Fellow of The Society of Rheology in 2019, and the award of the Medallion of the Australian Society of Rheology, its highest honour, in 2020.

Ravi Prakash has served the rheology community in a number of different ways. He has been a member of the Technical Program committee of annual meetings of The Society of Rheology on several occasions, and he has organised major international workshops on Complex fluids, Fluid-Structure interactions, and Hydrodynamics Fluctuations at the Monash University centre in Prato, Italy, along with a special symposium at the Pacific Rim Conference in 2014 celebrating Tam Sridhar’s 65th birthday. He was a member of the Bingham medal committee from 2017 to 2019 and is the Australian representative on the International Committee on Rheology. He served as the President of the Australian Society of Rheology from 2006 to 2008 and as the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Korea-Australia Rheology Journal from 2008 to 2020.

See also https://users.monash.edu.au/~rprakash/

Kelly M. Schultz is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. She has served The Society of Rheology in several different capacities throughout the years. She was on the membership committee from 2013 – 2019, serving as the chair of the committee from 2017 – 2019. In 2018, she also co-founded and began chairing the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, which was voted as a standing committee by an overwhelming majority in 2020. In 2019, she co-developed the annual Rheology Research Symposium, which provides mentoring, networking opportunities, career discussions and fosters diversity for our student members. This program will be run before every Annual Meeting. In addition to her service to SOR, she is also an active member of Area 01J (Fluid Mechanics) at AIChE serving on the Fluids Programming Committee since 2016, serving as the 2020 Meeting Programming Chair and being elected as the area Vice Chair in 2021. She is also a Consulting Editor of AIChE Journal in the area of Soft Matter.

Dr. Schultz obtained her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2011 as a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. While at Delaware, she was invited to speak in the American Chemical Society Excellence in Graduate Polymers Research Symposium and was selected as the Fraser and Shirley Russell Teaching Fellow. Following her PhD, she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She began her position as Assistant Professor at Lehigh University in 2013 and was named a P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor from 2016 – 2018. Dr. Schultz was named one of TA Instruments Distinguished Young Rheologists (2014), was awarded a NSF CAREER award (2018), the Lehigh University Libsch Early Career Research Award (2019) and the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science Excellence in Research Scholarship & Leadership (2020).

Her current research studies materials during phase transitions, specifically gels during gelation and degradation. An area of interest is the degradation of new hydrogel materials developed for biological applications, such as wound healing and tissue regeneration. Her group develops bulk and microrheological techniques to measure how 3D encapsulated human mesenchymal stem cells degrade and remodel synthetic hydrogel scaffolds during motility. They have also developed techniques, through a collaboration with Procter and Gamble Co., combining environmental manipulation in microfluidic devices with microrheological characterization to characterize evolving colloidal gels used as rheological modifiers.

See also http://www.schultzlab.io/

Martin Sentmanat is a successful entrepreneur who recently joined the faculty as a Professor of Practice in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University, and then as a National Science Foundation Fellow attended McGill University where he received his Masters and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering.

Prior to founding Xpansion Instruments, Martin worked as a Sr. Research Physicist for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company where he pioneered his work in the field of extensional rheology of polymer melts and elastomers. With more than 25 years of experience in advanced experimental rheology development and material physical properties characterization, he has authored numerous patents and served as a professional consultant to a multitude of academic institutions and industrial companies across the globe, and has also provided his expert witness services for numerous patent and civil litigation cases in the United States. He is an active member of The Society of Rheology and has been an invited speaker and instructor at conferences and technical forums focused on the rheology and physics of complex fluids and soft matter.

Maryam Sepehr is a research scientist at Chevron Oronite Company, with 25 years of experience in rheology, including 5 years performing fundamental research and 20 years applying rheology to new product development, processing, formulation and characterization of polymers, lubricating oils, polymer composites and nanocomposites as well as bio-based thermoplastic and polymer-based adhesives. She has successfully advanced new product developments and solved product performance and process related problems, in various industries, such lubricating oils, adhesives, and nanocomposites. She is a Chemical Engineer with a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal. She was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow from 2004-2006, then a Research Officer from 2006-2008 at the Industrial Materials Institute, National Research Council Canada. She then joined Avery Research Center (Pasadena, CA), where she worked for 4 years as Rheology and Thermal Analysis Team Leader. In 2012, she joined Chevron Oronite Company, the Viscosity Index Improver team as Lead Research Scientist.

Maryam has been member of The Society of Rheology since 2002 and has been actively volunteering since 2009. Within the Society, she has served as Member at Large of The SoR Executive Committee (2015-2016), organized the technical program, with co-chair Amy Shen, for the 86th SoR Annual Meeting in Philadelphia (2014). She has served on (2009 – 2017) and chaired (2018 – 2021) The SoR Education committee, organized short courses at annual meetings. She has served on the Diversity and Inclusion Ad Hoc/Standing committee, and as The SoR Representative on AIP Liaison Committee for Under-Representative Minorities, LCURM. Maryam has organized, for the last 7 years, AIP Industrial–Students forum during the SoR Annual Meetings, as main organizer, seeking sponsors, panelists, and organizing annual events. Maryam is also a member of the Canadian Society of Rheology (since 2007) and Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers (since 2015).