Welcome

Hi — I have moved my webpage to https://www.dmsussman.org/, so please visit me there! In the meantime, wordpress will be holding a snapshot of what everything looked like on 1/10/19….

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in soft matter theory at Syracuse. Together with Lisa Manning, Cristina Marchetti, and Jen Schwarz I am looking at rigidity transitions in models of cancer tissues, with a particular focus on features that control tumor boundaries.

Previously I worked with the soft matter theory group at the University of Pennsylvania. Randy Kamien and I looked at kirigami-inspired design of surfaces and at disordered materials in which geometry and topology conspire to determine mechanical and dynamical properties of the system. I also worked with Andrea Liu and Sid Nagel on problems related to amorphous solids with free surfaces; Tom Lubensky and I investigated the topological boundary modes that can exist in such systems.

My graduate studies were done at the University of Illinois, studying entangled polymer dynamics in Ken Schweizer’s research group. Our main focus was a rigorous treatment of polymer topological constraints — the idea that long polymers cannot cross through each other and thus become “entangled” — within a simple microscopic framework.

I graduated from Williams College in 2007 with B.A.’s in physics and mathematics. My undergraduate thesis — in quantum information theory and supervised by William Wootters — involved constructing rotationally symmetric, entropy-minimizing states for quantum systems with discrete degrees of freedom.