Please see my group's new site at https://pages.jh.edu/dbeller3.

I am a theoretical and computational physicist with research interests in soft matter and biological/biomaterial physics. The interplay of topological defects, nontrivial boundary geometries, and novel bulk material configurations is a common theme in much of my work. I also study biological population genetics and its connections with problems in statistical physics. Much of my work is in close collaborations with experimentalists from Physics, Materials Science, and Chemical Engineering backgrounds.

Research Gallery

In nematic liquid crystals, disclination loops encircle colloidal inclusions and microposts, and can guide elasticity-mediated colloidal organization.

In the smectic liquid crystal phase, molecules are ordered in layers of single molecule thickness. When the boundaries demand that the layers curve, equal layer spacing is accommodated through self-organized arrays of focal conic domains, which are layer geometries organized around ellipse-hyperbola defect pairs.