Sujit Datta is associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and the director of graduate studies in the department. His lab uses experimental and computational tools to study how soft (“squishy”) and living systems—such as polymer solutions and gels, colloidal dispersions, immiscible fluid mixtures, and bacterial communities—move through complex and crowded environments. Understanding how these materials interact with their environments, and how those interactions influence multi-scale transport processes, may help to address engineering challenges in water harvesting and remediation, geothermal energy, CO₂ sequestration, control of biogeochemical processes in the environment, and drug delivery. Datta also is affiliated with the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Princeton Bioengineering Initiative, the Princeton Institute of Materials, and the Princeton Center for the Physics of Biological Function.

VIDEO

• Engineering & applying soft materials for sustainable water management & food security
• A method to spy on bacterial behavior in complex environments
• Viscoelastic polymer flow in porous media
• Life in a tight spot: Bacterial motility in heterogeneous media