Arthi Jayaraman

Professor Arthi Jayaraman received her B.E (Honors) degree in Chemical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. She received her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from North Carolina State University, and conducted her postdoctoral research in the department of Materials Science and Engineering at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. In August 2008 she joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at University of Colorado at Boulder and held the position of Patten Assistant Professor till 2014. In August 2014 she joined the faculty at the University of Delaware of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering.

Jayaraman’s computational group will interface with the teams in the CCI with expertise purely in atomistic simulations as well as with characterization experts for nanothreads in solution and solid state.  The unique physical properties of the nanothreads (e.g., a persistence length ~100 nm versus the typical few nm for most conventional polymers or few microns for nanotubes) should make them suitable for incorporating chemical functionalization precisely on the exterior of the nanothreads. Jayaraman will use atomistic to coarse-grained molecular simulations to predict how the precise placement and orientation of various functional groups on the exterior of the nanothreads impact their self-assembly or dispersion in solutions. These simulations can also isolate the self-assembled structures that are possible only due to the unique physical properties of the nanothreads and not possible with conventional more flexible polymers or stiffer nanotubes. Recent computational development from the Jayaraman group on reverse engineering structure from analysis of small angle scattering profiles will be used to interpret structural characterization of nanothread containing solutions or composites.