UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Jacob Israelachvili, professor of chemical engineering, materials and biomolecular science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), will serve as the featured speaker for the Department of Chemical Engineering’s second annual Distinguished Lecture at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 26, in the Huck Life Sciences Building Berg Auditorium on the University Park campus.
The lecture is free and open to all students, faculty, staff, alumni and members of the University community.
Israelachvili’s lecture, “Dynamic (non-equilibrium, rate, time and history-dependent) Adhesion and Rupture Forces in Materials, Soft Matter and Biological Systems,” will focus on the increasing complexity of polymer and biological systems and the various categories of rate, time and history-dependent phenomena that have surfaced as a result — all of whose essential feature is their non-equilibrium nature. Israelachvili will explore these topics, focusing on data collected in recent experimental studies of interactions in viscoelastic, soft material, colloidal and biological systems that involve complex deformations, slow structural rearrangements and various relaxation processes occurring at different time scales.
For the past three decades, Israelachvili has served as a faculty member at the UCSB, where he holds joint appointments in the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Materials and Biomolecular Science and Engineering. He served as the associate director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UCSB from 1993 until 2003. His many awards include the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Alpha Chi Sigma Award; the Adhesion Society Award for Excellence in Adhesion Science; the American Chemical Society National Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry; and the Materials Research Society Medal.
Israelachvili is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of London. He is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Most recently, Israelachvili was added to the AIChE list “One Hundred Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era,” and elected to the fellowship of the American Academy of Science. In addition, he received the world’s highest award in tribology, the 2013 Tribology Gold Medal Award, for pioneering contributions to the technology and science of friction and wear.
Israelachvili’s presentation will serve as the Department of Chemical Engineering’s second annual distinguished lecture, a follow up to the 2015 talk that featured David A. Tirrell, the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. The event aims to bring together the materials science, chemistry, life science and engineering communities for an afternoon of learning and enrichment at University Park.