The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Dr. Suriyanarayanan "Suri" Vaikuntanathan will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor on August 1, 2014. Suri is a theoretical chemist. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology in Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2006 and his PhD in Chemical Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2011. His graduate research with Christopher Jarzynski was mainly focused on developing theoretical and computational methodologies, including generalizations of work fluctuation theorems that have helped analyze and understand the physics of nonequilibrium processes. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley with Phillip Geissler, Suri explored the theoretical underpinnings of the hydrophobic effect and developed a minimal coarse grained model of water that predicts hydrophobic and interfacial effects with surprising accuracy and highlights how fluctuations on various length and time scales couple to govern these effects. He also studied the statistics of rare fluctuations in kinetic networks similar to those found in biophysical models of polymer growth and molecular motors and illustrated how simple biochemical networks can exhibit dynamically heterogeneous behavior.
Suri's research program at Chicago will focus on developing and using tools of equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics to understand the behavior of complex systems. Specific research areas include: statistical mechanics and design principles for self-assembly far from equilibrium; principles of control and information processing and efficiency in biochemical signaling and adaptation networks (such as those involved in chemotaxis control in E. Coli) and molecular motors; and studies of aqueous fluctuations in heterogeneous environments with the goal of developing coarse grained models for efficient multiscale chemical and biophysical simulations. These interests span many important areas of research in physical chemistry, biophysics, and soft condensed matter physics and in many instances, existing theoretical and simulation methodologies are inadequate to describe these processes.