Sujit Datta

🇺🇸 加州理工学院
化学工程、生物工程与生物物理学教授

 

Sujit Datta is a Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biophysics at Caltech, where he moved in 2024 from Princeton University. He received a BA in Mathematics and Physics and an MS in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He then moved to Harvard, where he studied fluid dynamics and instabilities in soft and disordered media with Dave Weitz and obtained his PhD in Physics in 2013. Sujit’s postdoctoral training was in Chemical Engineering at Caltech, where he studied the biophysics of the gut with Rustem Ismagilov. He then started his faculty career at Princeton in 2017, and was promoted to Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Chemical & Biological Engineering in 2023. He also co-led the Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) on Living & Soft Matter of the Princeton Materials Research Science and Engineering Center from 2022-2024.

Sujit’s research is in the study of transport processes, which aims to predict and control the movement of physical entities such as molecules and cells. In particular, motivated by challenges in biotechnology, energy, medicine, and sustainability, his research group studies the transport of soft (“squishy”) and living systems—e.g., “complex” fluids, gels, and multicellular bacterial populations—through complex environments ranging from soils, sediments, and porous rocks to gels and tissues in our bodies. Sujit and his group have pioneered experimental techniques—combining microscopy, microfluidics, materials science, and biophysical characterization—to directly visualize such transport processes in model complex environments with systematically-tunable properties in the lab. He has thereby established a way to bridge the gap between idealized lab studies in uniform environments and complex processes in real-world settings. By integrating such experiments with theoretical/computational modeling, applying ideas from fluid and solid mechanics, biological physics, chemical dynamics, colloidal science, polymer physics, statistical mechanics, and network science, Sujit and his group have revealed and shed new light on the fascinating behaviors manifested by complex fluids and bacterial populations in complex environments, guiding the development of new approaches to biotechnology, environmental remediation, flow chemistry, and sustainability. 

Sujit also actively leads outreach efforts in STEM to bring together diverse perspectives and provide access to researchers from traditionally under-represented groups in studies of soft and living systems. In addition to leading professional activities for a number of scientific societies and agencies, he serves on the editorial boards of Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics and the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. Sujit’s scholarship has been recognized by awards from a broad range of different communities, reflecting its multidisciplinary nature, including the Allan P. Colburn and 35 Under 35 Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, three awards from the American Physical Society (Early Career Award in Biological Physics, Andreas Acrivos Award in Fluid Dynamics, and Apker Award), Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, Arthur Metzner Award of the Society of Rheology, Unilever Award of the American Chemical Society, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, NSF CAREER Award, and multiple commendations for teaching (including being described as “the most caring and engaging professor I have met at the entire university”). 

Sujit grew up in Toronto, but lost most of his Canadian accent by living in Abu Dhabi, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and New Jersey. In his free time, Sujit likes to play with his five-year-old daughter, cook, eat, run, and reminisce about his past life as a competitive kickboxer.

^† CiteScore 2023 by Elsevier

^‡ 中位数，仅统计进入同行评审阶段的稿件