Simons-NCBS Career Development Fellow
Research Experience:
I completed my PhD from IIT Kanpur, India, under the supervision of Prof. Anurag Gupta. My PhD work focused on building up a continuum framework for "incompatible elasticity" under a non-Euclidean geometry setting for studying the mechanics of ‘defects’, or ‘disorders’, in two dimensional matter. During my PhD programme, in an academic sojourn to the University of Calgary, Canada, I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Marcelo Epstein on a novel problem of "embedded homogeneity of thin material structures". Further, I worked with Prof. Lev Truskinovsky at ESPCI Paris-Tech, France as a post doctoral fellow, where I continued to further explore the research problems articulated during my PhD - understanding the remarkable ability of cytoskeleton to modify its rheological properties depending on its functionality and external conditions.
Research Interests:
My present research interest is to understand pattern formations in natural phenomena across spatiotemporal scales, with a specific focus on the role of mechanics in facilitating such phenomena in living systems. I am trying to combine academic training in mechanical engineering and continuum (solid) mechanics, along with my informal training in differential geometry and variational calculus, in order to come up with a powerful geometry-based, multiscale analytical tool that would allow me to create a novel continuum mechanics framework to explain the origin of complexity in active biological systems.
The larger focus of my research is to explain such phenomena from minimal continuum mechanical perspectives, and to further utilize this theoretical framework to design principles for creating new biomimetic materials, for example, artificial muscles and tissues, with distributed micro-engines. I am currently working with Prof. Madan Rao at the Simons Centre at NCBS, to study the various mechanical pathways that carry signals from the cell surface to the nucleus in a focused manner, under a setting of active hydrodynamic theory of liquid-crystalline elastomers.
Email: ayanrc@ncbs.res.in
Researchgate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ayan_Roychowdhury