My research program addresses a range of topics in the theory of condensed matter. Examples include glasses and the glass transition, water and aqueous solutions, nucleation, metastabilty, and protein thermodynamics. We employ computational and theoretical methods rooted in statistical mechanics to study problems such as the effects of temperature, pressure and co-solutes on protein stability; the quantification of disorder in materials; the structure, dynamics and phase behavior of water near surfaces with tunable hydrophobicity; dynamics in supercooled liquids; melting and freezing phenomena; the thermodynamics of hydrophobicity; and the complex phase behavior of mixtures involving fluids with multiple critical points.
We also investigate experimentally the structure and thermal stability of proteins and other biomolecules under low moisture conditions and in glassy matrices.
