Reika Katsumata Receives Hypothesis Fund Award to Rewrite the Rules of Materials

Reika Katsumata, assistant professor of polymer science and engineering, recently received an award from the Hypothesis Fund to rethink how the rules linking the properties of a material to its molecular sequence and architecture work. Her work will help pave the way to better understand a wide range of materials with far-reaching impact.

"As an experimental materials scientist and engineer, I'm always fascinated by simple physical characteristics that can reveal a lot about how materials behave-that's where I feel the impact is most significant," Katsumata says. "Measuring pressure-volume-temperature (PVT) relationships is one of the most powerful ways to understand and predict a material's properties, including thermal properties, strength, flow and many, many others."

Hypothesis Fund scout Shelly Peyton notes that Katsumata's project "is a unique combination of high risk, very technically challenging, and extremely fundamental. If she succeeds, Katsumata will pioneer a straightforward and affordable technique that will revolutionize how we characterize the fundamental properties of any polymeric material."

"I'm thrilled to be 'restarting the clock' on these PVT measurements, which had disappeared mainly due to safety concerns with mercury," Katsumata says. "It's exciting to develop a new generation of PVT measurements to study the latest materials developed over the past two decades."