Author Archives: dpreston

Undergraduate researcher Esha Ghai has been awarded the Chevron International REACH Scholarship and the BP Scholars Program Award. She is developing scalable coatings for engineered surface wettability.

A paper led by collaborators in the DRL has been published in Applied Physics Letters. This work shows two distinct maxima in droplet lifetime on heated microstructured surfaces, with implications in spray cooling and drag reduction.

Our paper on thermal inactivation of coronaviruses, led by Faye, has been uploaded as a preprint on ChemRxiv. We provide guidelines for dry heat sterilization and show that regional climate variations may affect virus lifetime.

Marquise Bell has accepted a position as a research assistant and will pursue his PhD in MECH at Rice University! After completing his BS in mechanical engineering at Baylor University, he will join the PI Lab in summer 2020.

Incoming PhD student Barclay Jumet has been awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! He will join the PI Lab in summer 2020 after completing his BS in mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama.

PI Lab’s three incoming graduate students arrived just in time to attend the AMPT Symposium at Rice University (pictured from left: Dan, Zhen, Faye, and Rachel). Dan presented on Fluidic Control through Surface Engineering.

Dan’s work on a soft ring oscillator, conducted with coworkers in the Whitesides Group at Harvard, has been published in Science Robotics. Dan’s article shows how completely soft devices can roll, undulate, sort, and more, without hard controls.

Incoming PI Lab PhD student Zhen Liu’s perspective on enhanced condensation heat transfer has been published in Joule. Zhen’s article highlights work by the Boreyko and Varanasi groups and outlines future opportunities in condensation research.

Our paper on data storage using small organic molecules has been published in ACS Central Science. Brian Cafferty compares this work to storing the contents of the New York Public Library in a teaspoon of protein, without energy, for millions of years.

Our paper on the use of lubricant infused surfaces to enhance heat transfer during condensation of hydrocarbons is among the top 100 most-read materials science articles in Scientific Reports in 2018. Read this open-access paper here.