Really cool work!!! Well done... 👏

Onward to five years of exciting science!
#NSFCAREER #Rheology #SoftMatter #MaterialsScience #STEMEducation #CaseWesternReserve #ArtsMeetsScience

I'm deeply grateful to my colleagues Joao Maia, Mike Hore, Sveta, Sam Root, Chris Wirth, and Kathleen Harper, among others, for their constructive and generous input, and to my friends beyond Case — Vivek Sharma, @samanvaya.bsky.social, @ankurg90.bsky.social and @meeraramaswamy.bsky.social

None of this would be possible without my incredible group, postdocs (Shweta Sharma and Sidong Tu), PhD students (Armin, Orhun Ayar, and Muzaffar Rafique)roup, and undergrads Alessandro, Ryan, Antonio, Caroline, Isaac, Ria, Enzo, and others — for their hard work and dedication.

I'm especially thrilled that this award is about more than research — it's equally about education, mentorship, and outreach. We'll be building immersive VR/AR tools that let K-12 teachers, high school students, and undergraduates explore suspension physics hands-on.

We're diving deep into the fundamentals of particle dynamics and rheology, with the goal of turning what's largely trial-and-error today into physics-based, predictive design rules. There are so many unknowns left to explore, and that's exactly what makes this work so exciting.

Particles suspended in fluids, from Newtonian solvents to complex polymer solutions, flow and behave. These suspensions are everywhere, in paints, foods, and countless everyday products, yet predicting how they'll behave during processing is still remarkably hard.

To answer WHY? We dug into structural rigidity theory, and third-order loops have been hypothesized to be the smallest minimal rigid structure. As per Lamans’ theorem (1970s), triangles are the smallest isostatic structures that do not deform under externally applied load. Happy to chat!

FINAL REVEAL: Viscosity collapses beautifully when plotted against the number of 3rd-order loops.
This collapse is universal — independent of stress, volume fraction, or even friction. We even find a power law behavior, signifying max. n3 at jamming.

This is where things got interesting: The mean-field golden standard models suggest viscosity to be driven by the frictional number of contacts. To test this, we performed extensive simulations changing packing fraction, stress, and sliding friction.
Spoiler: NO collapse

Earlier work hinted that DST onset ≈ loop formation.
Here, we visualized them directly. Sure enough, loops first appear right as suspensions undergo DST. We tracked how 3rd–8th order loops evolve with stress, packing fraction, and friction.

To answer the question: "What is the motif that underpins the DST transition?"
Enters network science: We disentangled our frictional network into 1) isolated edges, 2) Connected edges, and 3) closed cycles, aka loops (3-8).

It is established that DST manifests itself as a stress-activated transition from an unconstrained to a constrained state, leading to the formation of the frictional contact network. Now the question we had was “How about the topology/motif of this network that underpins DST?”

Such an amazing story of an excellent researcher in a wonderful lab.. Congrats :)

Thanks, Karen! I would love to chat more!