Yimin Luo

Biography

Dr. Yimin Luo is currently a postdoc at UCSB in the Valentine and Helgeson Groups, leading the instrument development front for microrheology and structure characterization to facilitate high-throughput material discovery. Previously, she was co-advised by Profs. Norm Wagner and Eric Furst at University of Delaware and spearheaded efforts to establish a unifying framework to test frictional contact model and shear thickening in high concentration colloidal suspensions. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Rice University and earned her Ph.D., from UPenn in Fall 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Kathleen J. Stebe. As part of her graduate work, she designed complex topography using microfabrication tools to steer the motion and directed the assembly of microparticles in nematic liquid crystals. Yimin has received multiple awards including Langmuir Student Oral Presentation Award, MIT ChemE Rising Stars, and University of Washington Distinguished Young Scholars Seminar (DYSS). During graduate school, she taught sophomore math weekly for Minds Matter, a national organization that prepares students from low-income families for college.

Research

I am broadly interested in the functional particles that are influenced by and adapt to the complex environment they are in, and how an understanding of these systems enable us to design functional soft materials.