CBE Seminar: Matthew Helgeson, University of California, Santa Barbara “Data-driven methods to accelerate soft (bio)materials formulation and processing”
Content
Host: Alec Linot
Abstract:
Advances in synthetic (bio)chemistry and materials discovery have dramatically expanded our capabilities to tailor soft materials technologies toward prompt needs in human health, energy conversion, and sustainability. However, realizing this potential will require breakthroughs in high-throughput experimental characterization methods to rapidly and efficiently screen the vast chemical, formulation and processing design spaces of relatively scarce materials at the lab scale. This is particularly true of rheology-enabled materials, whose properties and function arise from multi-scale behavior of polymers, colloids and biomolecules far from equilibrium, prohibiting the use of conventional high-throughput measurements and modern data-driven tools for molecular discovery and optimization. In this seminar, I will review our recent efforts to overcome these challenges, which combine custom-built high-throughput experiments with data-driven modeling to rapidly characterize and optimize rheology-enabled materials, while simultaneously providing routes to learn the molecular-scale physics underlying these materials. In the area of materials formulation, we present new automated measurement and analysis methods for high-throughput microrheology and fluid dynamics, which can be used to interrogate multi-scale behavior in scarce, multi-phase or time-evolving materials. I will discuss how high-throughput microrheology can be applied to various polymer materials design problems including 3D bioprinting and biopharmaceutical formulation. In the area of materials processing, we have developed a novel machine learning workflow that leverages experiments to generate large, information-rich time-flow-microstructure datasets in complex industrially-relevant processing flows, and use them to learn a “digital twin” of a precursor fluid of interest, and use physics-informed models to “decode” material physics from the data-driven models. Overall, these new combined experimental and modeling tools hold significant promise for accelerating the development, characterization, and manufacturing of new complex fluids for advanced materials processing.
Bio
Matt Helgeson is Professor and John E. Myers Vice Chair of Chemical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware in 2009, and performed postdoctoral research at MIT in the Novartis Center for Continuous Manufacturing. He joined the faculty at UCSB in 2011, where he has previously served as Interdisciplinary Research Group Leader within the Materials Research Laboratory, and Tool Development Co-Lead for BioPACIFIC MIP. Helgeson’s research focuses on the design of complex fluids for soft materials processing, and the development of in situ measurement methods to discover underlying macromolecular and colloidal physics of these materials. His research has been recognized with Early Career Awards from both the National Science Foundation (2013) and Department of Energy (2015), the Neutron Scattering Society of America Science Prize (2020), as well as the Victor K. LaMer Award (2011), Unilever Award (2016) and Outstanding Achievement in Nanoscience Award (2024) from the American Chemical Society. In 2026, he was elected Fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America.