Abstract: A fundamental challenge of modern physical science is to form structure that is not frozen in place but instead reconfigures internally driven by energy throughput and adapts to its environment robustly. With cell monolayers when they respond to injury, we find problems of intelligent materials. With catalytic enzymes, we find problems of active matter adaptability. Exploring the potential of liquid-phase TEM to image individual molecules and their mutual interactions, we analyze failed and successful encounters of polymers and proteins, and visualize enzyme conformational changes in real time. A picture emerges in which simple experiments, performed at single-particle and single-molecule resolution, can dissect macroscopic phenomena in ways that surprise.
Biography: Steve Granick is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his other major awards are the Paris-Sciences Medal, APS Prize in Polymer Physics Prize, and the ACS Prize in Colloid and Surface Chemistry. He worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with appointments in the departments of materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry, and physics; as Director of the Korean Institute of Basic Science Center for Soft and Living Matter, which was the Korean version of a Max-Planck Institute; and in 2023 took his present position in the department of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts.