Ronald Larson is the A.H. White and G.G. Brown Professor of Chemical Engineering. He is affiliated with the departments of Chemical Engineering, Macromolecular Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. He currently serves as interim Chair of Biomedical Engineering. Larson’s research interests include theory and simulations of the structure and flow properties of viscous or elastic fluids, sometimes called “complex fluids,” which include polymers, colloids, surfactant-containing fluids, liquid crystals, and biological macromolecules such as DNA, proteins, and lipid membranes. He also studies computational fluid mechanics, including microfluidics, and transport modeling, using mesoscopic and macroscopic simulation methods. He has written numerous scientific papers and two books on these subjects, including a 1998 textbook, “The Structure and Rheology of Complex Fluids.”
Simulated three dimensional self assembly of spherical “Janus” particles with attractive faces (blue, on far left and red on far right) and non-attractive faces (white). The far left shows packing in the “rotator” phase, where the attractive faces have not ordered orientationally, which occurs at lower temperature. Other images show single sphere, or groups of spheres, indicating hexagonal ordering. Surrounding points show positions of surrounding spheres, at multiple time points, indicating motions about crystal lattice points.