UCSB Chemical Engineering is excited to welcome Assistant Professor Sho Takatori to the department, starting in 2019!

Sho is interested in the statistical mechanics and fluid dynamics of biological soft matter systems. He combines techniques of computational and experimental soft matter to study how emergent biological properties emerge from collective activity of microbial and cellular communities. These insights will advance fundamental understanding of the properties of bacterial biofilms and biological tissues, and could also lead to the design of bio-inspired, adaptive complex fluids for applications in medicine, manufacturing, and biomaterials.

Sho received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with John Brady from Caltech, where he was a NSF fellow and a Gates Millennium Scholar supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He spent a part of his graduate studies as a visiting scholar in Jan Vermant’s soft matter and interfacial rheology group at ETH Zürich.

Sho is currently a Miller Fellow with Dan Fletcher at UC Berkeley, and will join the faculty of UCSB Chemical Engineering in 2019.

Photo by Mario de Lopez Photography for Caltech’s E&S magazine (Dec 2015)