Mateo Robbins

About

Matthew “Mateo” Robbins is a lecturer in the Master of Environmental Data Science program at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has focused on network models of natural resource governance, sustainable fisheries, sea level rise adaptation, and the science of science communication. He teaches courses on machine learning and text analysis for environmental problems. Robbins joined the Bren School after completing a postdoctoral position at the Computational Communication Lab at UC Davis. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Group in Ecology at UC Davis, an MA in Cognitive Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, and a BA in Psychology from Willamette University.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Physics
• Mechanics
• Composite material
• Condensed matter physics

Selected publications

• Fractal geometry of contacting patches in rough elastic contacts

  Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids · 2022-01-29 · 30 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Many naturally formed and processed surfaces are rough over a broad range of length scales. Surface roughness reduces the area of contact between solids, with ramifications for phenomena that depend on the geometry of the interface and the amount of direct contact, including friction and adhesion. In this work, we employ large-scale boundary-element simulations for nonadhesive, elastic solids to study the size dependence of contact patch mean pressure and geometry for patches formed between soli…

  PublisherDOI

• Effects of Coarse-Graining on Molecular Simulation of Craze Formation in Polymer Glass

  Macromolecules · 2022-02-01 · 25 citations

  article

  Crazing precedes the crack propagation in polymer glass and greatly increases the fracture toughness. We perform molecular dynamics simulations to study craze formation in glassy polystyrene (PS). The use of a structure-based coarse-grained (CG) model allows us to create and equilibrate a large-scale sample (≈ 71 nm × 71 nm × 71 nm) of well-entangled PS chains with molecular weight 10 times the entanglement threshold. The back-mapping of the CG sample to the united-atom (UA) representation gener…

  PublisherDOI

• Criticality in sheared, disordered solids. I. Rate effects in stress and diffusion

  Physical review. E · 2021-04-19 · 18 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Rate effects in sheared disordered solids are studied using molecular dynamics simulations of binary Lennard-Jones glasses in two and three dimensions. In the quasistatic (QS) regime, systems exhibit critical behavior: the magnitudes of avalanches are power-law distributed with a maximum cutoff that diverges with increasing system size L. With increasing rate, systems move away from the critical yielding point and the average flow stress rises as a power of the strain rate with exponent 1/β, the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Models for the behavior of boron carbide in extreme dynamic environments

  Journal of the American Ceramic Society · 2021-08-19 · 17 citations

  article

  Abstract We describe models for the behavior of hot‐pressed boron carbide that is subjected to extreme dynamic environments such as ballistic impact. We first identify the deformation and failure mechanisms that are observed in boron carbide under such conditions, and then review physics‐based models for each of these mechanisms and the integration of these models into a single physics‐based continuum model for the material. Atomistic modeling relates the composition and stoichiometry to the amo…

  PublisherDOI

• From Molecular to Multiasperity Contacts: How Roughness Bridges the Friction Scale Gap

  ACS Nano · 2023-01-23 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  The tangential force required to observe slip across a whole frictional interface can increase over time under a constant load, due to any combination of creep, chemical, or structural changes of the interface. In macroscopic rate-and-state models, these frictional aging processes are lumped into an ad hoc state variable. Here we explain, for a frictional system exclusively undergoing structural aging, how the macroscopic friction response emerges from the interplay between the surface roughness…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Non-Equilibrium Systems: Spreading, Deformation, Adhesion and Friction

  NSF · $560k · 2005–2010

• MRI: Acquisition of 100TF Graphics Processor Laboratory for Multiscale/Multiphysics Modeling

  NSF · $382k · 2009–2013

• Deformation and Fracture of Disordered Solids: Mechanisms Underlying Macroscopic Behavior

  NSF · $580k · 2010–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Marek Cieplak

  Polish Academy of Sciences

  32 shared

• Lars Pastewka

  University of Freiburg

  30 shared

• Gary S. Grest

  Sandia National Laboratories

  29 shared

• Shiyi Chen

  Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine

  23 shared

• Ting Ge

  University of South Carolina

  23 shared

• Belita Koiller

  Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

  23 shared

• Thomas C. O’Connor

  Carnegie Mellon University

  20 shared

• Binquan Luan

  IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research Center

  19 shared

Education

• PhD, Physics

  University of California Berkeley

  1983

• M.A., Physics

  Harvard University

  1977

• BA, Physics

  Harvard University

  1977

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