
Sujit Datta has won the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award from the Society of Rheology for his work studying the dynamics of soft and living systems in complex environments, touching on applications in energy, environmental remediation and human health.
The Metzner Award is given annually to a person whose terminal degree was no more than 12 years earlier and who has distinguished him or herself in rheological research, rheological practice or service to rheology, the study of flowing matter. The award consists of a $7,500 honorarium and a plaque.
The award recognized Datta’s pioneering studies of 3D visualization and modeling of fluids in complex environments. His work has shown how flows of soft and living matter are altered by the confinement and structural disorder of many real-world settings and guided development of new approaches to environmental remediation, energy production, agriculture, water security and biotechnology.
Datta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, aims to determine the fundamental principles governing applications of soft materials and their behavior in complex spaces, such as porous rocks and biological tissues. He and his lab team study materials including polymer solutions and gels, colloidal dispersions, immiscible fluid mixtures and biofilms to help solve engineering challenges like water remediation, oil recovery, carbon sequestration and drug delivery.
One recent study showed how bacterial communities grow in three dimensions, forming rough broccoli-like shapes that branch intricate patterns, and a previous study showed how bacterial communities stick together during collective migration, especially when following food gradients. Datta’s research has also revealed fundamental insights into how bacteria navigate tight spots, and by extension invented a tunable assay platform, known as PoreBiome, on which researchers can more deeply study bacterial behavior for biomedical applications. His lab also developed expertise to make disordered porous rocks that are transparent, allowing the researchers to visualize multiphase flow within them in 3D.
Before joining Princeton in 2017, Datta did his undergraduate work in math and physics at the University of Pennsylvania; earned a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard; and did postdoctoral research in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. He has been named a Pew Biomedical Scholar, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and one of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ 35 Under 35. He has also won the American Chemical Society’s Unilever Award and the American Physical Society’s Biological Physics Early Career Award, among many others. Datta, who is also director of Graduate Studies in Princeton CBE, is an associated faculty member in the Princeton Bioengineering Initiative, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Princeton Materials Institute.