Physicist Aparna Baskaran wins prestigious early career award
Baskaran was cited for her research on soft matter.
Associate Professor of Physics Aparna Baskaran has won a 2019 Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research from the American Physical Society (APS).
Soft matter consists of materials that fall between the categories of liquids and solids such as foams, gels, liquid crystals and biological structures like cell membranes and proteins.
Baskaran studies the unique properties of soft matter that allow it to self-assemble and form complex and changing arrangements in response to external stimuli. Such research may one day enable us to create new compounds and machines capable of rapid, shape-shifting transformations.
The APS cited her for achieving "pathbreaking advances in our understanding of the physics of soft materials out of equilibrium, especially active and granular matter."
Baskaran earned her MS at the Raman School of Physics Pondicherry University in Puducherry, India, and her PhD at the University of Florida, where she won numerous teaching and research awards, before her appointment as a postdoc at Syracuse University. She came to Brandeis in 2010.
Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER Award, and her articles have been published in such journals as the Physical Review, Nature Physics, Soft Matter, and the Journal of Statistical Mechanics.
Categories: Research, Science and Technology
