Shengkai Li

Position
Position Associate Research Scholar/CPBF Fellow
Office
228 Carl C. Icahn Laboratory
Education

PhD in Physics 2022, Georgia Institute of Technology

Bio/Description

I received my PhD in Physics from Georgia Institute of Technology. In grad school, I studied active matter with robotic objects, such as self-propelled vehicles driving on an elastic substrate, vibrating bristle-bots with magnets on the periphery, and shape-changing robot on a sphere. Individuals and collectives of these exhibit interesting phenomena such as field-mediated interaction due to substrate deformation, phase separation mimicking coarsening process in continuum, and force rooted from geometric phase. At the end of my PhD study, I stepped a bit into ecology with many robots moving to consume resources. Their survival rate depends on the spatial-temporal feature of the resource, suggesting possible counterparts in natural ecological systems. While still interested in active matter, I feel excited to work in CPBF to seek biological implications from artificial active matter and explore natural active matter systems.