Welcome
... to the Furst Research Group Wiki at the University of Delaware!
The wiki is a resource for sharing information in the research group and with the rest of the world. (Hello, world!) All group members are welcome to contribute.
Research in the Furst Group
Research in the Furst Group focuses on the physics and chemistry of colloidal, polymeric, biomolecular, and other soft materials. The engineering applications of our work include the characterization and design of structured and complex fluids, creating new nanomaterials through self-assembly, and controlling physical processes in biotechnology, like protein aggregation at interfaces. Many of the problems we work on stem from close partnerships with industry and national laboratories.
You can find out about our current research topics and publications, including our contributions to the science of biopharmaceuticals, microrheology, directed self-assembly, colloidal gelation, and more.
Or you can read online articles about our microgravity research on the International Space Station, where we've led experiments to study colloid self-assembly.
One hallmark of Furst Group research is our interest in developing new experiments. From laser tweezer measurements of colloidal micromechanics and high pressure microrheology to dielectric spectroscopy and microfluidics, we design, build, validate, and use unique experiments to probe, push, and break soft materials at nanometer and micrometer lengthscales. The recent book from the group on the principles and practice of microrheology (Eric M. Furst and Todd M. Squires, Microrheology, Oxford University Press: New York, 2017) is a culmination of many of these investigations. It's currently available at OUP and Amazon. A new, even more affordable paperback edition came out in 2021. (With corrections!)
The group hosts a Microrheology Resources, including a Particle Tracking Microrheology Tutorial, Matlab routines, and sample data sets.
Current members of the research group
- Prof. Eric M. Furst, Principal Investigator -- Faculty page, Google Scholar, CV
- Brian Paul, PhD candidate (BS, UC Irvine)
- Kenneth Crane-Moscowitz, PhD candidate (BS, Georgia Tech)
- Jason Conradt, PhD candidate (BS, Oregon State University)
- Bree Huntington, PhD candidate (BS, Penn State)
- Matthew Pitell, PhD candidate (BS, Case Western)
- Tucker Stevens, Undergraduate researcher
- Dylan Stare, Undergraduate researcher
Here is a list of Furst Group alumni, 2001-2021
A few of our recent collaborators
- Jim Swan, Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT -- About Jim Swan (1982-2021)
- Jan Vermant, Department of Materials, ETH Zürich
- Anaël Lemaître, Xavier Chateau, and Julie Goyon, Laboratoire Navier, Rheophysics and porous media group, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and Université Gustave Eiffel
- Patrick Spicer, University of New South Wales, Australia
- George Fytas, Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung, Mainz, Germany
- Michael Solomon, Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan
- Todd Squires, Chemical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara
- Olivia du Roure, Julien Heuvingh, Anke Lindner, and Marc Fermigier, PMMH, ESPCI, Paris
At Delaware, we collaborate with the Lenhoff, Roberts, Wagner and April Kloxin groups in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Chris Kloxin and Pochan labs in Materials Science and Engineering.