Recent Posts

Getting a Heads-Up on Landslides from Space

Graduate student Vrinda Desai was quoted in an APS Physics story about her paper Forecasting landslides using community detection on geophysical satellite data published in...
movie still of force transmission in chain-like structures within a photoelastic granular material

Envisioning Research 2021

Grad students Farnaz and Keith took 1st and 2nd place in the 2021 NCSU Envisioning Research competition. See their winning videos here: First Place, Graduate...
droplet resting on gel surface, deforming it

Congrats to Shih-Yuan!

Congratulations to Dr. Shih-Yuan Chen, for the successful defense of his PhD on all things elastocapillary and interfacial and squishy: “Mechanics and Dynamics in Soft...

Jack wins a Goldwater Scholarship

Rising-senior Jack Featherstone has been awarded a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, in recognition of his accomplishments and promise as a researcher. Read an interview with him...
Sand Grain Properties Cartoon (shape, roughness, strength, density, rigidity)

What Makes Sand Soft?

This is one of my favorite questions that we work on, and I had chance to sit down and talk about it with Randall Munroe...

Knitting Ripples

NC State students have probably seen Dr. Mary Elting and me hard at work during colloquium … knitting. Recently, she and I sat down with...
student present a virtual talk

Conferences in the time of COVID-19

Late on February 29 2020, as travel to the APS March Meeting in Denver was already underway, the American Physical Society leadership made a smart...
Images of disordered lattices, overlayed with the rigid clusters

Characterizing failure in disordered materials

Postdoc Estelle Berthier has been working to understand how disordered materials fail, using structures created with a variety of connectivities via a laser-cutter. In collaboration...

Defining precursors of ground failure

Our research group has had some success over the past few years, analyzing timeseries and networks to forecast where failures will occur in laboratory materials....

Fingering and Fracturing in Soft Materials

In May, Karen Daniels gave a keynote talk at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems on the group’s work into a variety of...

Granular Experiments in Zero-G

In November 2018, we had a chance to fly a set of granular experiments on parabolic flights funded by NASA. Karen Daniels and undergraduate Tristan...