Jayson Paulose
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Jayson Paulose is currently a sixth-year PhD student in Applied Physics at Harvard University. He grew up in Cochin, India, and attended high school in Singapore before enrolling at Princeton University for his undergraduate studies in Physics. At Princeton, Jayson got his first taste of research through junior independent work projects modeling quantum cascade lasers and solitons in optical fibers. For his senior thesis, he used computational methods to study the electronic properties of disordered semiconductors under Prof. Ravin Bhatt. At Harvard, Jayson's research interests shifted to studying the mechanics and dynamics of soft materials, which he now pursues under the guidance of Prof. David R. Nelson. HeÕs particularly interested in understanding the deformations of thin elastic sheets and shells, and in modeling self-assembly and self-organization processes. Although Jayson is a theorist, many of the problems he works on are directly inspired by experiments, and his research has benefitted from several collaborations within the Harvard MRSEC. Jayson has collaborated with Prof. Joanna Aizenberg's group to model pattern formation in arrays of microscale elastic pillars, and with members of Prof. David A Weitz's lab to understand how thin porous elastic capsules buckle under osmotic pressure. He is currently studying the self-assembly of colloidal particles on the spherical surface of emulsion droplets, in an IRG 2: Droplet-Templated Materials collaboration with experimentalists in Prof. Vinothan N. Manoharan's research group. Jayson aims to keep on figuring out the hows and whys of physical phenomena through a career in scientific research.