April 2024  We've been far behind on posting group news lately, so here are some big updates from the Simmons lab over the last few years. Dr. Simmons has been elected as the next President of the USF Faculty Senate.  A paper from our group published in Nature Physics provided new insights into the fundamental physics of nanoconfinement effects on dynamics, and possibly into the origins of the glass transition temperature itself.  We also had many other exciting results - we showed how polymer sequence can be employed to program assembly into complex nanoshapes and to modulate the glass transition temperature; we've published papers establishing new insights into how dynamics are modified in thin films and near polymer-polymer interfaces; we published on new insights into glassy aging; and Dr. Simmons published a tutorial review chapter on Macromolecular Modeling.  USF group member William Drayer successfully defended his Ph.D. disseration and has moved on to a great postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. The group received new funding from NSF Polymers, in collaboration with the Priestley group at Princeton University, to study the physics of irreversible polymer adsorption from melts. We received new funding from the Air Force, also in collaboration with the Priestley group, to establish strategies to control polymer glass formation behavior with polymer chain sequence.   Its been an exciting few years, and we can't wait to see what comes next!

August 2021 The Simmons group, together with collaborators at Princeton, Kyushu, and Zhejiang Sci-Tech Universities, have published new results in the journal Nature. These findings establish a predictive understanding of polymer chain dynamics at surfaces, with broad implications for the behavior of thin film and nanostructured polymers.