[Assistant-faculty] FW: Request for experimental CM physics position

["Landis, Shannon R." <Shannon Landis tufts edu>]

Dear colleagues:

Since I will not be in town during our faculty meeting next week, I am 
writing to summarize the main reasons why I believe that a request for a 
position in soft CM physics experiment should be our department highest 
priority this year. I will divide my arguments in two classes: general and 
personal.

General arguments: soft CM physics has been showing unprecedented growth 
during the past 5 years. This is reflected by many factors such as the 
large number of active research groups at all major universities in the 
world, the increasing number of new research directions especially the 
ones connecting this field with other science and engineering disciplines, 
the large number of students (undergraduates and graduates) who choose 
this area for doing research, and not at last in the increase in funding 
opportunities. Physicists are now getting funds from agencies not 
traditionally linked to physics research such as NIH (which for example 
has recently opened a new program in the physics of cancer), and also 
supplemental funding from more traditional NSF programs. For example (as I 
mentioned before) the NSF Physics of living systems has constantly 
increased funding over the past 5 years. Experimental soft CM physics is 
particularly suited for attracting such funds. 

Personal Arguments: Personally, I consider this to be a very exciting time 
to work in soft CM physics. My particular expertise is in Biological 
Physics, which is a highly interdisciplinary field with great potential 
for applications especially in disease diagnosis and treatment. However, 
as important as these applications are, what I found even more interesting 
(and as far as I can tell the same is true for the other 9 members of my 
research group, 7 of whom are undergraduates) is the possibility to study 
physics in soft matter and biological systems. At the core of this 
enterprise is a search for discovering and understanding the laws that 
govern emergent behavior in complex soft and living systems (i.e. 
collective phenomena whose ultimate cause involves interactions between 
many simple units but which cannot be easily predicted from knowledge of 
the component parts alone). This approach is unique to physics, and as 
physicists we can bring not only a novel set of experimental and 
theoretical techniques but also a distinctive intellectual approach to 
these rapidly evolving fields.
My expertise is in Atomic Force Microscopy and nanotechnology and I 
collaborate extensively with Peggy, Tim and Leon in our department, as 
well as with several researchers from Tufts: David Kaplan, Sameer 
Sonkusale, and Fiorenzo Omeneto. On a more personal note my research would 
benefit enormously from the expertise of another CM experimentalist in 
areas of CM physics where Tufts is currently not represented. Without 
making this a specific list for a search position I can tell that 
currently we have very limited experimental expertise here at Tufts in 
microfluidics (for an up to date overview of this sub-field I refer you to 
the excellent colloquium talk given last week by David Weitz), 
supramolecular self assembly (micelles, microemulsions etc.), liquid 
crystals, gels etc. Having a researcher with expertise in any of these 
fields will significantly strengthen our soft condensed matter physics 
group, and will provide enormous potential for collaborations with 
researchers from several other departments such as Biomedical Engineering, 
Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Medical School, Electrical Engineering. 

For all these reasons I believe we should request  the hiring of a soft CM 
physics experimentalist as our highest hiring priority for this year.
Thank you.

Cristian


Cristian Staii
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Tufts University,
Science and Technology (STC) Center, Room 209 Medford, MA 02155 USA
Phone: 617-627-5368

email: Cristian Staii tufts edu
https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/display/CristianStaiiTuftsUniversity/Home