Some glamor shots from our lab’s summer research were featured on the Williams College instagram – check it out!

Prof. Jensen was selected to receive the 2023 Outstanding Early Career Adhesion Scientist Award from the Adhesion Society for her “accomplishments and leadership in adhesion science.”

Our research — and recent invited talk at the American Chemical Society’s 2023 Spring Meeting — on how a leak can stop itself was covered in a Research News article in Physics Magazine. (Spoiler alert: it’s a “damp” harmonic oscillator. Read more in the news article, or in our preprint on the arXiv.)

A self-arresting water leak emerging from a paraffin-coated tube.

The 2023 March Meeting of the American Physical Society brought together thousands of physicists from around the world — with quite a few Ephs among them, including lab alums Hyeongjin Kim ‘21 and Adam Dionne ‘22. It was great to catch up!

Senior Honors Thesis student Katie Nath ’23 won Best Poster awards at two recent conferences — the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) at Brown University and the Annual Meeting of the Adhesion Society for her Physics Senior Thesis work describing how “Liverwort Gemmae Interact as Capillary Multipoles.” Congratulations, Katie!

Adam Dionne ’22 has won the American Physical Society’s 2022 LeRoy Apker Award, the highest honor for undergraduate physics research in the United States. Only two winners are chosen each year, one each to students from PhD-granting and non-PhD-granting institutions. Congratulations, Adam!

Adam worked with Professors Henrik Ronellenfitsch and Kate Jensen on a combined theoretical and experimental thesis entitled “Self-organizing Slime: Physarum polycephalum’s Fluid Transport Network.” He is now continuing to pursue research in biological physics as a Ph.D. student in Applied Physics at Harvard University. More information about Adam’s current research at Harvard can be found here.

Adam is the sixth Williams Physics student to win the Apker Award, joining alumni Ben Augenbraun ’15, Chris Chudzicki ’10, Nathan Hodas ’04, Charlie Doret ’02, and Brian Gerke ’99. More Williams students have won the Apker Award than graduates from any other primarily undergraduate college.

Adam Dionne ’22 was selected as one of six finalists for the American Physical Society’s LeRoy Apker Award, the highest honor for undergraduate physics research in the United States. Congratulations, Adam!

Our lab’s recent work (and new NSF grant!) studying deformation-dependent adhesion was featured in the Williams Magazine article “Sticky Science” — along with a recipe for making your own sticky notes at home.

The lab had a strong showing at the APS March Meeting, with Caroline Tally ‘21.5, Adam Dionne ’22 (co-advised with Prof. Henrik Ronellenfitsch), and Woody Martineau ’22 (also co-advised with Prof. Ronellenfitsch) presenting talks, and Rose Tchuenkam ’23 attending as a co-author of Caroline’s work. (Prof. Dan Sussman ’07 — now at Emory Physics — joined us for dinner and a photo.)

Ephs at the 2022 APS March Meeting

Professor Kate Jensen has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The three-year, $413,000 grant in collaboration with Purdue University will support her research project titled “Deformation-Dependent Adhesion of Stretched Compliant Networked Polymer Systems.” The project will focus on increasing understanding of how changing the shape of soft, adhesive materials (e.g., through stretching or compression) modifies their adhesive properties and may lead to the development of new responsive adhesives.

Read more at Williams Today.