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Todd Squires

Todd Squires

Todd Squires

Professor
​Chemical Engineering

Affiliation: 
Chemical Engineering

Contact

(805) 893-7383
3347 Engineering II

University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106

Fellow of: 

American Physical Society (APS)

Honors

Outstanding Chemical Engineering Faculty Award (2022-'23); Robert W. Vaughan Lecture in Chemical Engineering, Caltech; Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society; Mid-Career Award, American Electrophoresis Society; The Dudley Saville Memorial Lecture at Princeton; Pierre Gilles de Gennes Prize; Allan P. Colburn Memorial Lectureship, U of Delaware; Francois Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics; Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award; Beckman Young Investigator; NSF CAREER Award;  'Rising Star', Chronicle of Higher Education

Research

Materials & Interfaces, Modeling, Theory & Simulation

Transport science plays a role in all things dynamical - and can often play the crucial role. As such, it is an extremely versatile science. Learning to think effectively about fluids and transport enables one to understand and contribute to a wide range of interesting and important problems. Our group works various areas of micro-scale fluid mechanics and transport science - microfluidics and electrokinetics, active, nonlinear and interfacial microrheology of complex materials, polymer dynamics and sensors. Current theoretical and experimental projects include:

  • Non-linear (induced-charge) electrokinetic flows, with an eye towards portable, self-contained and implantable microfluidic devices,
  • Extending the capabilities of "microrheology" (which typically uses colliodal beads as passive tracers to measure the rheological properties of complex materials) by using active forcing to extract nonlinear material response properties;
  • Developing and employing a novel technique for measuring the rheology of fluid-fluid interfaces, with particular emphasis on natural and synthetic lung surfactant layers and surfactant-laden polymer-polymer interfaces;
  • Theoretical and experimental investigations into interfacial mobility of nanoparticle and copolymer surfactants (collaboration with Leal and MRL), and
  • Understanding the self-assembly and transport properties of nanostructured materials, with applications in ultracapacitors for energy storage (collaboration with Chmelka).

This is a wide range of topics, loaded with interesting and important questions - underscoring the versatility of this fascinating field.

Education

PhD Physics, Harvard University
BS Physics, University of California, Los Angeles
BA Russian Language and Literature, University of California, Los Angeles