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DOE Pulse
  • Number 428  |
  • December 8, 2014

Argonne's Arsonson directs traffic at busy research intersections

Igor Aronson

Igor Aronson.

In his almost 20-year tenure at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, physicist and materials scientist Igor Aronson has primarily investigated soft condensed matter physics, which deals with the material states that are easily deformable by thermal fluctuations or mechanical stresses. Much of his work has focused on the intersection of small mechanical structures and living matter – bacteria. Aronson took some time to talk about his research, career, and hobbies.

What attracted you to work at Argonne?

I came to Argonne in 1996 as a visiting scientist, attracted by the lab’s high scientific standards and significant opportunities to conduct challenging research. I’ve stayed, and my career here has been very rewarding.

What are the things you like most about your work?

As a research scientist, I appreciate the availability of resources, which allows for a level of freedom to conduct cutting-edge research.

What role do you play at Argonne?

I see my role as a senior scientist primarily as one of directing research traffic, developing my program and supervising junior colleagues—postdocs, students and visiting scholars. My approach to this work includes the formulation of scientific problems, brainstorming with colleagues, writing papers, disseminating research results at scientific conferences and submitting grant applications in pursuit of funding. I love to do a lot of the work myself, from code development and running computer simulations, to analytical calculations, in order to better understand the problem. I like to go in to the lab and talk to experimentalists, look at the data, try different fits.

My main research topic is broadly defined as soft condensed matter physics, dealing with the material states that are easily deformable by thermal fluctuations or mechanical stresses. The research scope of soft condensed matter pertains to common materials such as polymers and suspension of biological particles, like bacteria and a variety of self-assembled biomaterials. Self-assembly, a tendency of simple building blocks to organize into complex architectures, is a unique and fascinating opportunity for materials science. In-depth understanding of self-assembly paves the way for design of the next generation of smart materials for energy technologies.

Highlights of our research have been in the news, including feature stories in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Scientific American and Forbes. Argonne has also published several short videos online, including one video of bacteria spinning microscopic gears. It’s an example of how this method could be used to create micro-machines.

How does your work support the lab’s larger scientific mission?

My program is relatively new and highly interdisciplinary. It is conceptually aligned with Argonne’s major initiative on Materials for Energy which explores the incorporation of self-assembled, bio-inspired materials. Argonne’s Strategic Plan supports this work, stating that “discovery and synthesis of new compounds are critical bottlenecks [to be overcome] both for grand challenge science and for Argonne’s research strategies in energy, environment, biology and national security.”

My program explores non-orthodox approaches to the design and discovery of novel materials via controlled dynamic self-assembly. Computational modeling and design of self-assembled materials also stimulates the transition of scientific computing from petascale to exascale—another major Department of Energy (DOE) and Argonne initiative on exascale computing.

What sorts of positive mentoring experiences, formal or informal, have you had at Argonne?

I consider supervising postdocs and graduate students a very important aspect of my work. It includes the formulation of challenging scientific problems, and then encouraging the postdoc or student to obtain elegant and visible results—disseminating these results in the most prestigious journals and presenting them at international conferences.

What sorts of Argonne activities or clubs do you participate in?

I actively participate in our division’s “Tea and Coffee Club.” This activity includes the brewing and drinking of premium teas and coffee and discussing underlying physical mechanisms responsible for the unique taste quality of these drinks. I also bike to work when the weather is not prohibitively bad, and encourage my colleagues, mostly by personal example, to follow. I should confess that so far there are only a very few followers, but there’s always hope for more.

Submitted by DOE's Argonne National Laboratory