Bryan VanSaders

Bryan VanSaders is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Drexel University. He primarily uses computer simulation to study active soft matter systems, in which many microscopic machines interact to produce novel emergent phenomena. These systems present new possibilities for creating synthetic metamaterials with life-like properties (reconfigurability, adaptability, resiliency) through the dissipation of work at the microscopic scale, and require new approaches in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics to understand. He is particularly interested in the intersection of active matter and topological defects in dense crystalline colloidal assemblies, and the role of information in emergent swarm dynamics. He also studies nonequilibrium methods of driving soft material assembly through acoustic and electrical fields. Dr. VanSaders joined the Department of Physics (CoAS) in 2023. Prior to joining Drexel he was a Kadanoff-Rice postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Dr. VanSaders was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Materials Science and Engineering in 2019.