Mentor Areas
Professor Yodh’s current interests span fundamental and applied questions in condensed matter physics, medical and biophysics, and the optical sciences. Areas of ongoing research include: soft materials, complex fluids and networks, carbon nanotubes, laser spectroscopy, optical microscopy, optical micromanipulation, biomedical optics, biophotonics, functional imaging and spectroscopy of living tissues, photodynamic therapy and nonlinear optics.
Description:
Two classes of research are done in my lab.
Students can work on biomedical optics projects that typically employ light (diffuse light) to measure physiological properties of tissues. Research ranges from pre-clinical and clinical studies to development of instrumentation and software. Broadly, in these projects, we are probing the hemodynamic and metabolic responses of various tissues (brain, breast, muscle) and in various contexts (cancer diagnosis and therapies, brain injury and function, peripheral arterial disease, etc.). Much of the research involves experimental tools of optics including light transport in tissue, laser spectroscopy, electro-optics, RF electronics, and correlation spectroscopy and/or theory (e.g., inverse problems, diffuse optical analysis), and/or physiology (characterization of diseased/normal states, etc.)
Students can also work on experimental (often optics-related) projects in Soft Condensed Matter Physics. Briefly, this field includes investigation of “traditional” complex fluids such as colloids, emulsions, polymers, liquid crystals, foams, and granular media, as well as investigation of “less-traditional” active or far-from-equilibrium matter such as arise in synthetic and living filamentous networks, single cells, collections of cells, flocks of birds, and more. We are interested in understanding assemblies of soft matter constituents that exhibit a rich phenomenology of structures, dynamical behaviors, and mechanical/optical/functional properties that often have no analogs in conventional solid-state physics.
Preferred Qualifications
Students at all levels will be considered, but knowledge of basic physics, chemistry, biology and computation/math will be useful. Students will typically join in an ongoing PhD or Post-doc project; they will learn about and carry out experiments and analysis. Sometimes this research leads to publications. Work is often easiest to carry out in the summer, but we will also consider students for work during the school year.
Project Website
Learn more about the researcher and/or the project here. Yodh Lab
Details:
Preferred Student Year
Second-Year, Junior, Senior
Academic Term
Fall, Spring, Summer
I prefer to have students start during the above term(s).Volunteer
Yes
Yes indicates that faculty are open to volunteers.Paid
Yes
Yes indicates that faculty are open to paying students they engage in their research, regardless of their work-study eligibility.Work Study
Yes
Yes indicates that faculty are open to hiring work-study-eligible students.