Venkat Ganesan

Biography

Venkat Ganesan holds the position of Kobe Endowed Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and his Master’s and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1999 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He joined the University of Texas in 2001 after spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Materials Research Laboratory in University of California Santa Barbara (with Prof. Glenn Fredrickson). He is the author of more than 160 technical publications and more than 100 invited talks and seminars. He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, the American Physical Society’s Dillon Medal award (2009), a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow (2009), was elected a fellow of American Physical Society (2013) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2018).  He has held the position of honorary visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (2008).

Advanced materials are presently proposed for numerous applications, ranging from photonic and quantum devices to biomedical and tissue engineering applications. Venkat’s research focus is to develop a theoretical and computationally-based program aimed at elucidating the fundamental mechanisms underlying the design of novel, self-assembled advanced materials. The goal is to complement the research of experimentalists (synthetic chemists, chemical engineers, and material scientists) by providing simple but quantitative guidelines to rationally design and synthesize these materials. Towards this broad objective, his group's research focuses on the development and use of a wide variety of tools spanning both equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, conventional fluid mechanics, molecular rheology and computational tools to complex fluids and biological systems. A common theme that has pervaded most of the group’s research has been the multiscale approach. Quite often in the systems we are considering, and for the properties we are interested in predicting, modeling descriptions at a single scale (either molecular or continuum) do not typically suffice or even exist. The research focuses on using either computational approaches (combining molecular simulations with continuum level numerical methods) or statistical mechanical models to link the molecular details of the components to macroscopically measurable and tunable properties. Within this broad theme, the problems are typically characterized by experimental accessibility (i.e. for issues which are either currently of experimental focus and/or experimentally testable) and impact on practical applications.

Google Scholar Page