Steve Granick

About

Steve Granick is the Robert K. Barrett Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering. His current research projects include active polymers, molecules in extreme environments, biological intelligence, and memory of non-neural cells. As a faculty member, he is involved in advancing the understanding of complex polymer systems and their applications, contributing to the fields of polymer science and engineering.

Research topics

• Chemistry

Selected publications

• The ergodicity question when imaging DNA conformation using liquid cell electron microscopy

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-01-09 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Assessing the ergodicity of graphene liquid cell electron microscope measurements, we report that loop states of circular DNA interconvert reversibly and that loop numbers follow the Boltzmann distribution expected for this molecule in bulk solution, provided that the electron dose is low (80-keV electron energy and electron dose rate 1–20 e − Å −2 s −1 ). This imaging technique appears to act as a “slow motion” camera that reveals equilibrated distributions by imaging the time average of a few…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Electric spiking activity in epithelial cells

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-03-17 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Epithelial cells (human keratinocyte cells and the canine MDCK cell line), traditionally viewed as electrically non-self-excitable and involved primarily in physiological functions such as barrier presentation, absorption, secretion, and protection, are shown here to exhibit traveling extracellular electric charge when they recover from spatially focused, laser-induced wounding of confluent monolayers cultured on a multielectrode array chip. Voltage spikes measured on these electrodes display de…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Volatile Droplets on Water are Sculpted by Vigorous Marangoni-Driven Subphase Flow

  Langmuir · 2023-11-10 · 7 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  The shapes of highly volatile oil-on-water droplets become strongly asymmetric when they are out of equilibrium. The unsaturated organic vapor atmosphere causes evaporation and leads to a strong Marangoni flow in the bath, unlike that previously seen in the literature. Inspecting these shapes experimentally on millisecond and submillimeter time and length scales and theoretically by scaling arguments, we confirm that Marangoni-driven convection in the subphase mechanically stresses the droplet e…

  PublisherDOI

• Exceptions to Fourier’s law at the macroscale

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-03-05 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The usual basis to analyze heat transfer within materials is the equation formulated 200 years ago, Fourier's law, which is identical mathematically to the mass diffusion equation, Fick's law. Revisiting this assumption regarding heat transport within translucent materials, performing the experiments in vacuum to avoid air convection, we compare the model predictions to infrared-based measurements with nearly mK temperature resolution. After heat pulses, we find macroscale non-Gaussian tails in…

  PublisherDOI

• Aqueous Ion Mobility over a Broad Concentration Range

  Physical Review Letters · 2025-06-11 · 2 citations

  article

  For concentrations between dilute and the highly concentrated limit of almost 5 M, we compare our explicit-water molecular dynamics simulations of LiH_{2}PO_{4} (which dissociates into H_{2}PO_{4}^{-} anions relevant to biochemical processes and Li^{+} cations relevant to battery technology) to our pulsed-field gradient NMR measurements of ion diffusion, and find compensation between electrostatic and osmotic forces. The significance is that, noticing that the Kirkwood equation holds when using…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Polymer Dynamics at Surfaces and in Complex Media

  NSF · $366k · 2006–2010

• In Situ Imaging and Spectroscopy of Tribological Contacts

  NSF · $318k · 2006–2011

• Rotation Diffusion of MOON Particles

  NSF · $312k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Sung Chul Bae

  Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology

  132 shared

• Yoon‐Kyoung Cho

  Seoul National University

  62 shared

• Stephen M. Anthony

  Sandia National Laboratories California

  46 shared

• Erik Luijten

  Northwestern University

  41 shared

• Yingxi Zhu

  35 shared

• Tsvi Tlusty

  Institute for Basic Science

  34 shared

• Huan Wang

  Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences

  34 shared

• Jing Yan

  Yale University

  28 shared

Labs

• Steve Granick's LabPI

  Develop and exploit simple, creative, and novel design paradigms that will change the way scientists, engineers, and the general public use and understand materials.

Education

• Ph.D., Physics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1982

• B.S., Physics

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1977

Similar researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Vincent Rotelloh-132
• Zhu Chenh-85
• Wei Fanh-68