Research Expertise and Interest

theoretical polymer, soft materials, electrostatic double layer

Research Description

Rui Wang is an assistant professor and the Cupola Era Endowed Chair in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley.  His lab's research is interested in theoretically understanding the complex structural and dynamic behaviors of soft matter systems. Soft matters constitute the basic components of living systems and are critical for materials that meet the emergent requests in environment, energy and health. Modeling complex soft matter systems with multiple components, interactions and length/time scales possesses great challenges. They seek to develop simple molecular theories to elucidate the physical insights behind the complex behaviors. With the fundamental advances, they build detailed computational tools as a low-cost, high-throughput platform and collaborate closely with experimentalists for the rational design of new materials such as antifouling membranes, batteries, stimuli-responsive gels and biomedical materials. Current research projects include:

• Electrostatics at Interfaces

• Structure and Dynamics of Ion-Containing Polymers

• Ion solvation and transport in electrolytes for lithium batteries

• Complex Polymer Networks towards the Design of Smart Materials

To solve these problems, they develop simple coarse-grained models at the molecular level, which will then be incorporated into the framework of statistical mechanics, and further solved by using modern analytical and numerical methods, such as field theoretical techniques, network theories, liquid-state integral equations and computer simulations.