Welcome!
We are a young new biophysics and soft matter group in the Department of Applied Maths in the University of Western Ontario in London (ON). Our research is geared towards the interface between condensed matter physics, biology and biomedical sciences. Typically, we employ large scale computer simulations combined with analytical studies. Most of our projects are done in collaboration with experimental groups.
Currently we concentrate on problems related to multiscale modeling of biological systems, lipid membranes, pattern formation in reaction-diffusion systems, and computational methods.
From these pages you'll find more about our research, downloadable software, events, computational facilities and jobs/studentships. If you would like to know more, get re/preprints, suggest a collaboration, etc., please don't hesitate to contact us.
Research highlights (reload the page to see a different one)
It is impossible to overemphasize the
importance of polymers.
The dynamics of polymer melts is typically described in
terms of the Rouse and reptation models: short chains are
are not entangled and can move easily. That is
the physical origin of the Rouse model. Longer chains are
entangled and constrained to move in fashion that
resembles the motion
of a reptating snake. Hence the name reptation model.
We have introduced a method that captures the reptation regime
in coarse-grained (DPD) simulations.
- Reptational dynamics in dissipative particle simulations of polymer melts, P. Nikunen et al., Phys. Rev. E. 75, 036713 (2007). [online]
Support
I am pleased to acknowledge funding and support by- the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- NSERC Discovery Accelerator Program
- Ontario Early Researcher Award Program
- Centre for Chemical Physics.
- DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI)