Professor Daan Frenkel

The numerical exploration of routes to design novel, self-assembling structures and materials. In particular, his group is interested in the possibilities that bio-molecular recognition and motor action offer to create complex, nano-structured materials.

Our primary research interests include:

• Developing novel Monte Carlo techniques to predict the thermodynamic stability of complex structures,
• Exploring novel dynamical simulation techniques to predict the rate at which novel structures form from a meta-stable parent phase,
• Quantifying the disorder in granular packings, and
• Coarse-grained modelling of bio-molecular systems.

I am interested in the many different manifestations of entropy. Understanding of entropy may be useful in the context of energy issues, as the `energy problem' is actually an `entropy problem' .