DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

I am a soft condensed matter experimentalist, and my lab’s focus is to understand, characterize, and control soft materials. Soft materials, such as gels, pastes, and suspensions, are completely disordered, highly nonlinear, and fundamentally out-of-equilibrium; to understand these materials requires the development of new insights and innovative techniques. In my work, I use emergent structure formation as a powerful new tool to probe soft materials. Exploring a diversity of materials is central to my lab's science; we identify model systems for soft materials, and then exploit their simplicity to understand complex material response. 

Honors & Awards:

• Outstanding Referee, Physical Review Letters (2023)
• Faculty Honor Roll, Northwestern Office of Undergraduate Research (2022)
• Soft Matter Emerging Investigator, Royal Society of Chemistry (2021)
• Yodh Prize, University of Chicago (2014)
• Robert A. Millikan Fellowship (2010 - 2013)

Selected Publications:

• Inertia-dilatancy interplay governs shear thickening drop impact
  Mobaseri, A., Gordillo, L., Burton, C., Yoon, S., Lee, D., Kumar, S., Driscoll, M.M., Cheng, X.
  Physical Review Letters, 136, 148201 (2026)
• Emergent clusters in strongly confined systems
  Bethmage, P., Fish, R., Sprinkle, B., Driscoll, M.M
  Journal of Chemical Physics, 164, 064910 (2026)
• Unconstrained dynamic gel swelling generates transient surface deformations,
  VanZanten, A., Chen, S., Driscoll, M.M., Szczepanski, C.R.
  Soft Matter, 20, 6742-6753 (2024)
• A simple catch: thermal fluctuations enable hydrodynamic trapping of microrollers by obstacles,
  van der Wee E.B., Blackwell B.C., Usabiaga F., Sokolov A., Katz I., Delmotte B., Driscoll M.M,
  Science Advances, 9(10):eade0320, (2023)
• Coexistence of solid and liquid phases in shear jammed colloidal drops,
  Shah, P., Arora, S., Driscoll M.M., 
  Communications Physics 5, 222 (2022)

Link to publications