MSE Talk: Mrityunjay Kothari, University of New Hampshire

Speaker: Mrityunjay Kothari, University of New HampshireTitle: Multi-Physics Mechanics of Soft Materials in Complex Environments Abstract: Soft materials are making the transition from controlled lab environments to real-world scenarios, suchas flexible batteries, bioartificial organs, implantable biomedical devices, and soft robotics. In real-worldenvironments, soft materials will inevitably face a broad set of thermodynamic driving forces— thermal,chemical, electric, and magnetic—that strongly couple with their mechanical behavior. For instance,changes in temperature can degrade a material’s ability to sustain mechanical loads, quenching cantrigger phase separation and microstructure reorganization, and mechanical loading may enhancetransport or chemical reactivity. Therefore, to successfully enable the use of soft materials fortransformative applications, it is crucial to develop a fully coupled description of their response tocomplex environments. In this talk, I will discuss two research projects that model multi-physics couplings in soft materials and demonstrate the fundamental role of multi-physics mechanics in biology and engineering. First, I will discuss our work explaining how cells expertly combine multiple driving forces to organize their internal materials into membraneless compartments, and how the same fundamental mechanics can be applied towards the design of novel materials. I will then turn to cryopreservation, a frontier with transformative potential for human health: in the U.S. alone, approximately 17 patients die each day awaiting an organ transplant, a crisis driven by the inability to store organs long-term. A primary failure mechanism is the severe thermo-mechanical damage tissues sustain during freezing. I will present our recent work on predictive modeling of freezing-induced damage in soft materials, which can serve as a powerful tool for understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of the resulting injury and for designing improved cryopreservation strategies. Bio: Mrityunjay Kothari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and afaculty member in the Integrated Applied Math program and the Center of Integrated Biomedical andBioengineering Research at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA), where he started inFall 2022. He held postdoctoral positions at MIT and, briefly, at Brown University. Dr. Kothari earnedhis Ph.D. and Sc.M. in Solid Mechanics from Brown University, where he was the recipient of the“Outstanding Dissertation Award” in the School of Engineering. He holds a Bachelor’s degree inMechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His current research interestslie in the multi-physics mechanics of materials, with the goal of understanding how materials respond tocomplex real-world environments, how multi-physics couplings can be applied towards the design ofbetter materials, and how biological systems—multi-physics by their very nature—take advantage ofthese couplings in their function. He integrates theory and experiments with tools and techniques fromsolid mechanics, materials science, polymer physics, soft matter, and applied mathematics in pursuit ofthese goals. He is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2026).