MSE Talk: Mrityunjay Kothari, University of New Hampshire

Speaker: Mrityunjay Kothari, University of New Hampshire

Title: Multi-Physics Mechanics of Soft Materials in Complex Environments

Abstract: Soft materials are making the transition from controlled lab environments to real-world scenarios, such as flexible batteries, bioartificial organs, implantable biomedical devices, and soft robotics. In real-world environments, 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 can trigger phase separation and microstructure reorganization, and mechanical loading may enhance transport or chemical reactivity. Therefore, to successfully enable the use of soft materials for transformative applications, it is crucial to develop a fully coupled description of their response to complex 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 a faculty member in the Integrated Applied Math program and the Center of Integrated Biomedical and Bioengineering Research at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA), where he started in Fall 2022. He held postdoctoral positions at MIT and, briefly, at Brown University. Dr. Kothari earned his 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 in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His current research interests lie in the multi-physics mechanics of materials, with the goal of understanding how materials respond to complex real-world environments, how multi-physics couplings can be applied towards the design of better materials, and how biological systems—multi-physics by their very nature—take advantage of these couplings in their function. He integrates theory and experiments with tools and techniques from solid mechanics, materials science, polymer physics, soft matter, and applied mathematics in pursuit of these goals. He is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2026).