Chemistry professor Torquato wins 2009 Adler Award

Torquato — who is currently an associated faculty member with the chemical engineering, mechanical and aerospace engineering, and physics departments — takes a multidisciplinary approach to problems in materials science.

“My natural curiosity to understand a broad range of physical and biological phenomena (including cancer modeling) drives my research interests,” Torquato said in an e-mail. “Nature provides a plethora of puzzles that intrigue me.”

Torquato studied fluid dynamics and heat transfer as a graduate student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before moving on to statistical mechanics in heterogeneous materials.

“My interests today have significantly diverged from my initial work on heterogeneous materials, but I still use statistical-mechanical machinery and methodologies,” Torquato explained.

He is also a senior faculty fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Sciences, which, according to its website, endeavors to “enhance research and education in the theoretical natural sciences.” Torquato is also an active faculty member of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM).

Torquato is currently research director of the Complex Materials Theory Group, a research group based in the chemistry department, PRISM and Princeton Center for Theoretical Science that focuses on exploring the relationship between the macroscopic and microscopic behaviors of complex materials, with a current emphasis on heterogeneous materials.

“Heterogeneous materials are mixtures of two or more different materials that can occupy different regions of space,” said Torquato, who gave the example of galaxies distributed across a universe. Other examples of such materials are composites like fiberglass, which consists of fibers distributed throughout a polymer matrix. Biological tissues, in which cells are packed within a diffusing liquid, can be thought of in a similar way.

“One of the things that we’re after are physical properties of the material so we can design and actually make them,” Torquato said. His group focuses on accurately modeling the structure of materials through correlation functions with the goal of optimizing material properties like stiffness, lightness and strength.

“[Torquato] is interested in solving fundamental problems of how to do things like pack spheres and do computer simulations,” said Karin Rabe ’82, who received the Alder Award in 2008 and was on this year’s nomination committee.

The APS was founded in 1899 by 36 physicists who declared its mission to be “to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics,” according to the society’s website. It has since become a forum for public discourse in physics, with programs in education, public outreach and media relations, and has maintained an active relationship with the public and the government, according to the website.

The award, which consists of a $5,000 honorarium, a certificate and an invitation to lecture in a session of the Materials Physics Division of the March APS meeting, was first endowed in 1988 in honor of David Adler, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT whose research focused on semiconductors.

But for Torquato, the award is not about the money.

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“Given the economy these days, the award money will barely pay for a full tank of gasoline,” he said.

To win the award, “you have to have made outstanding contributions in research to materials physics, but you also have to have this extra quality of being exceptionally good at communication, usually lecturing or writing review articles,” Rabe explained.

It was the combination of lecturing and his book, “Random Heterogeneous Materials: Microstructure and Macroscopic Properties,” published in 2002, which won Torquato this distinction, Rabe said.

Torquato said he plans to put the award money toward his children’s education.