Seth Fraden

Biography:
Seth Fraden is Professor of Physics at Brandeis University. His research centers on liquid crystals formed by filamentous viruses and related bioinspired soft materials, where phase behavior, self-assembly, and emergent structure arise from colloidal and biological building blocks. He combines experiment, theory, and computation to study these systems both near equilibrium and far from equilibrium. Fraden received a B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1979) and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brandeis University (1987), followed by postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Grenoble, France. He has developed applications ranging from microfluidic platforms for high-throughput protein crystallization and serial diffraction to chromatographic methods for quantifying molecular interactions. Current research directions include programmable assembly of DNA origami and de novo designed proteins into virus-like architectures, and active matter nematics and gels based on microtubules, actin, and molecular motors. From 2012 to 2024 he served as Director of the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Brandeis. He received the 2008 Innovation Prize of the International Organization of Biological Crystallization and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2020.

Title of the communication:
From Passive to Active Nematics: Universality, Order, and Flow in Soft Matter Inspired by Bob Meyer