A new Simmons group paper published in the Journal Macromolecules establishes new understanding and design strategies for the control of copolymer glass transition tempreratures using monomer sequence, pointing the way to new opportunities for control of polymer glass formation while maintaining constant chemical composition. Congratulations to Simmons group member and first author William Drayer on this great work! 

The Simmons group has received new funding from the National Science Foundation under award number CBET - 2208238 to launch a joint effort with Dr. Rodney Priestley at Princeton University, aiming to understand how the deformation behavior of polymers changes near surfaces and in nanoscale domains. This work will build on prior collaborations between these groups leading to a joint publication in Nature. 

Her work on thin film dynamics and glass formation has been published in journals including Nature, PNAS, and Macromolecules. She will now be moving on to a postdoc with Peter Kasson at the University of Virginia, where we expect to see more great things from her!

December 2021 Simmons group Ph.D. student Davindra Tulsi has successfully defended his Ph.D., making him the 10th Ph.D. alumnus of the Simmons group! He has done groundbreaking work on assembly of sequence-specified synthetic polymers, and look forward to his great success in his career moving forward.

August 2021 A Simmons Group collaboration with the Schweizer group at UIUC, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes a predictive understanding of altered dynamics in thin films from simulation and theory.

July 2020 The Simmons group has received funding from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund to investigate the molecular origins of polymer motion near the glass transition using experiment and simulation.

The American Chemical Society Rubber Division has announced that Dr. Simmons will receive the 2020 Sparks-Thomas  Award for Younger Scientists.

Dr. Simmons gave a presentation at the XXVII International Materials Research Congress in Cancun, Mexico, describing advances in design of sequence-specific polymers and glass-forming materials using evolutionary algorithms.

This July, Dr. Simmons gave an invited talk on polymer dynamics near Tg at the Telluride Polymer Physics Workshop. This talk described recent work from the Simmons group at the intersection of polymer dynamics and the glass transition, advancing the understanding of polymer dynamics at low temperatures.

Dr. Simmons' invited presentation at the American Chemical Society 2019 Spring Meeting described our recent progress in establishing a unified phenomenological understanding and new physical insight regarding alterations in dynamics near interfaces. These alterations are of broad important to the understanding and performance properties of nanostructured materials.

A paper by the Simmons group that identifies several universal aspects of the glass transition has been highlighted on the inside cover of a Soft Matter special issue on emerging investigators. 

Ph.D. Student Daniel Diaz Vela successfully defends his Ph.D. dissertation.

Simmons group moves to the University of South Florida.