个人简介

Edith Sevick graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a BSE (Chemical Engineering) and received her PhD (Polymer Science & Engineering) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has since held positions at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (1989-1990), the University of California at Berkeley (1990-1992), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (1992-1996). She was appointed to the Research School of Chemistry in 1996, and is currently Professor.

研究领域

Polymers & soft condensed matter

Soft Matter is a sub-discipline of condensed matter and focusses upon chemical & biological matter that is easily deformed by thermal forces or fluctuations. These materials show their most interesting behaviour/properties at energy scales on the order of kT where classical (as opposed to quantum) physics dominate. Unlike classically hard condensed matter, the properties of soft matter cannot be understood solely from the atomic constituents, their bonding, and enthalpic interactions. Instead, soft matter is characterised by mesoscopic self-organisation of many molecules (e.g. self-assembly) and/or by a large number of internal degrees of freedom, as exhibited in the flexibility and number of conformer structures of a single DNA molecule or synthetic polymer). Soft materials exist in a wide variety of equilibrium and metastable states that are easily perturbed by external fields --more simply stated, these are highly responsive materials and consequently hold potential in many applications. This group is interested in energy paths of soft matter, as for example, the work required to stretch a single DNA molecule or to propel a colloid near a liquid interface or membrane surface. Our experimental tools are pico-Newton-scale force measurement devices, such as Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Optical Tweezers (OT), while our predictive efforts use theory and computational methods in statistical thermodynamics.

近期论文

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Sevick, E & Williams, D 2016, 'A Two-Stroke, Two-Cylinder Piston Rotaxane Motor', ChemPhysChem, vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 1927-1933. He, H, Sevick, E & Williams, D 2016, 'Isotropic and Nematic Liquid Crystalline Phases of Adaptive Rotaxanes', The Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 144, no. 12, pp. 124901-1-124901-12. Sevick, EM & Williams, DRM 2016, 'Threading a Ring or Tube onto a Rod: An Entropically Rare Event', Nano Letters, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 671-674. He, H, Sevick, EM & Williams, DRM 2015, 'Fast switching from isotropic liquids to nematic liquid crystals: Rotaxanes as smart fluids', Chemical Communications, vol. 51, no. 92, pp. 16541-16544. Sevick, EM 2015, 'Nanomachines: a light-driven molecular pump', Nature Nanotechnology, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 18-19. Sevick, EM & Williams, DRM 2014, 'Conformational isomers of linear rotaxanes', Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 141, no. 11, pp. 114904/1-5. Pinson, M, Sevick, EM & Williams, DRM 2013, 'Mobile rings on a polyrotaxane lead to a yield force', Macromolecules, vol. 46, no. 10, pp. 4191-4197. Sevick, EM & Williams, DRM 2013, 'A piston-rotaxane with two potential stripes: force transitions and yield stresses', Molecules: a journal of synthetic organic and natural products, vol. 18, no. 11, pp. 13398-13409. Gao, YX, Wang, GM, Williams, DRM, Williams SR, Sevick EM, 2012, 'Non-equilibrium umbrella sampling applied to force spectroscopy of soft matter', Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 136, no. 5, pp. 054902. Gao, Y, Williams, D & Sevick, E 2011, 'Dynamics of molecular shock-absorbers: energy dissipation and the Fluctuation Theorem', Soft Matter, vol. 7, no. 12, pp. 5739-5744. Wang, G, Prabhakar, R, Gao, Y et al 2011, 'Micro-rheology near fluid interfaces', Journal of Optics, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 044009/1-7. Gao, Y & Sevick, E 2010, 'A Model of a Homopolymer Brush as a Switch', Macromolecules, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 2042-2047. Boesten, R, Sevick, E & Williams, D 2010, 'Piston Rotaxane Monolayers: Shear Swelling and Nanovalve Behavior', Macromolecules, vol. 43, no. 17, pp. 7244-7249. Sevick, E & Williams, D 2010, 'Piston-Rotaxanes as Molecular Shock Absorbers', Langmuir, vol. 26, no. 8, pp. 5864-5868. Wang, G, Prabhakar, R & Sevick, E 2009, 'Hydrodynamic Mobility of an Optically Trapped Colloidal Particle near Fluid-Fluid Interfaces', Physical Review Letters, vol. 103, no. 24, pp. 248303/1-248303/4. Sevick, E, Ranganathan, P, Williams, S et al 2008, 'Fluctuation theorems', Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, vol. 59, pp. 603-633. Wang, G & Sevick, E 2008, 'Optical Tweezers manipulation of colloids and biopolymers: non-equilibrium processes', Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation, ed. Kishan Dholakia and Gabriel C. Spalding, SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, Bellingham, USA, pp. 70380L/1-8. Ranganathan, P, Sevick, E & Williams, D 2007, 'Coarse-graining intramolecular hydrodynamic interaction in dilute solutions of flexible polymers', Physical Review E-Statistical, Nonlinear and Soft Matter Physics, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 011809/1-011809/12. Carberry, D, Baker, M, Wang, G et al 2007, 'An optical trap experiment to demonstrate fluctuation theorems in viscoelastic media', Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. S204-S214. Wang, G, Reid, J, Carberry, D et al 2005, 'Experimental study of the fluctuation theorem in a nonequilibrium steady state', Physical Review E-Statistical, Nonlinear and Soft Matter Physics, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 046142/1-11.