Director, IBS Center for Soft and Living Matter, South Korea
www.softmatt.ibs.re.kr
Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, USA
www.groups.mrl.uiuc.edu/granick 

A fundamental challenge of modern fundamental and applied science is to form structure that is not frozen in place but instead reconfigures internally driven by energy throughput and adapts to its environment robustly. Predicated on fluorescence imaging at the single-particle level, this talk describes quantitative studies of how this can happen. With Janus colloidal clusters, we show the powerful role of synchronized motion in self-assembly. In living cells, we find that transportation efficiency problems bear a provocative parallel with polymer chain trajectories with their spatial extent, and with jammed matter in their time evolution. A picture emerges in which simple experiments, performed at single-particle and single-molecule resolution, can dissect macroscopic phenomena in ways that surprise.


Steve Granick is Founding Director of the Center for Soft and Living Matter. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his other major awards are APS Fellow (1992), Paris-Sciences Medal (2002), APS national Polymer Physics Prize (2009), NSF Special Creativity Award (2012), and ACS national Colloid and Surface Chemistry Prize (2013). He served as Chair of the DOE Council on Materials Panel on Polymers at Interfaces (2002) and Chair of the APS Division of Polymer Physics (2006). He holds and has held Honorary or Visiting Positions at numerous universities in Europe and Asia.

Before joining the IBS (Institute for Basic Science), Granick spent 30 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), most recently as the Racheff Chair of Materials Science and Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Professor of Physics and Biophysics. His education was at Princeton University (B.A. 1978) and the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D. 1982). His doctoral study was with J.D. Ferry, the most prominent polymer scientist of his generation. His postdoctoral study was with P.-G. de Gennes (Nobel Prize, 1991).