A Georgetown Treasure for Faculty

Oxford University contains a set of “halls” that offer portals into the University educational programs and support communities of students and faculty connected to them. In 1896, what is now called “Campion Hall” was launched by the Society of Jesus. Currently, Campion Hall is serving graduate students, most pursuing the doctorate. It considers applications for admission to all four Divisions of the Oxford (Humanities; Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences; Medical Sciences; and the Social Sciences), but by preference mainly admits students for studies in the Humanities and Social Science Divisions.

For some years, Georgetown has sponsored a program of residency for faculty in Campion Hall. The residency enables extended faculty research stays at Oxford, typically for one semester or for one to two months during the summer. All full-time Georgetown faculty members across all of Georgetown’s campuses, including Georgetown University in Qatar are eligible to apply.

It is useful to read the testimonies of faculty who had residencies there, to get a sense of the benefits.

The purpose of this post is to note how such residencies might accelerate the research agenda of Georgetown faculty members.

Recently, Georgetown physicists Daniel Blair, Emanuela Del Gado, and Jeffery Urbach won a large 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will permit combined experimental and computational investigation of the role of microscopic rotations, fluctuations, and friction in an important class of particle gels. (Soft solids formed from gels of particles are found in a wide range of materials, with applications ranging from consumer products to bio-manufacturing and additive manufacturing.)

The Georgetown team will use a suite of novel tools to reveal, for the first time, the dynamics of rotations of individual particles, and use this information to determine how the particles assemble into networks that support forces and determine the stiffness and strength of the gels. They will use these insights to develop robust pathways to engineering materials with defined properties and support the design of tunable and adaptive materials for applications such as self-healing, stimuli-responsive materials, and materials for 3D printing. In addition, this project will support efforts to harness soft materials to address the profound challenges of sustainability by strengthening contacts between the soft matter research community and policy makers

Jeff Urbach tells the story of how this new grant award relates to Campion Hall. With a little paraphrasing, here’s Jeff’s story:

Back in 2019 as I was starting to think about my sabbatical, I heard great things about Campion Hall. I didn’t have any collaborators at Oxford, so I looked through their researchers to see if there was anyone who might match my interests. I found Professor Roel Dullens in the Chemistry Department doing interesting stuff, and reached out. He responded positively and happily took me up on my offer to provide free labor for a semester.

We jointly developed an idea for a project, and I applied for residency with the Global Engagement Office, and was given 3 months in the Fall of 2020. With the pandemic, that didn’t work out as planned, but I started working with the Dullens group remotely, and did manage to get 6 weeks at Campion in Spring 2021 (my wife and I were their first US visitors post-lockdown).

The project that Roel and I proposed has worked out pretty well (two papers so far, and work in progress), but while I was working with the group I learned of some other work that they were doing, synthesizing particles with unique properties that would allow us to learn really new things about an important class of gels, using unique tools that Dan Blair has developed in his lab at Georgetown, and technology that he and I have developed over the years.

And it just happens to be a type of material that my colleague Emanuela Del Gado studies computationally and is widely recognized as a leader. Hence, the proposal came together quite naturally, relying heavily on preliminary data kindly provided by Roel’s group.

Not all Campion Hall residencies are likely to generate such direct and rapid benefits, but this story illustrates that such possibilities are real. We’re lucky to have in place support for the residency and to experience such tangible benefits to groups of Georgetown faculty.