Krystyn J. Van Vliet

Thomas Lord Assistant Professor of Materials Science
and Engineering

ScB, Materials Engineering, Brown University, 1998
PhD, Materials Engineering, MIT, 2002

Room 8-237, 77 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
617-253-3315 (phone), 617-252-1175 (fax)
krystyn@mit.edu
Professor Van Vliet's Research Group

By probing materials at their most basic structural and functional length scales, Dr. Van Vliet’s group investigates mechanically coupled transitions in material behavior and structure. The living cell is a particularly interesting example of a material system which processes mechanical stimuli via chemical and structural modifications. They are understanding this phenomenon of mechanotransduction by scanning individual, living cells with chemically functionalized mechanical probes, creating real-time images which contain topographical, mechanical, chemical, and kinetic data at sub-nanometer resolution. This approach can be used to study other mechanically induced phenomena such as defect nucleation in crystals, superelasticity in metallic alloys, piezoelectricity in ceramic compounds, and conformational binding in biological substrates.

Selected Publications

"Enhanced Stiffness of Amorphous Polymer Surfaces under Confinement of Localized Contact Loads," Advanced Materials, 19: 2540–2546 (2007) (with others).

"Many-Body Potential for Point Defect Clusters in Fe-C Alloys," Physical Review
Letters, 98: 215501 (2007) (with others).

"Equilibration of Experimentally Determined Protein Structures for Molecular
Dynamics Simulation," Physical Review E, 74: 061901 (2006) (with E. Walton).

"Probing Drug-Cell Interactions," Nano Today, 1: 18–25 (2006) (with P. Hinterdorfer).

"Chemomechanical Mapping of Ligand-Receptor Binding Kinetics on Cells," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104: 9609–9614 (2007) (with others).

Professor Van Vliet's research on testing mechanical properties of materials was the Nov. 4, 2005, cover story of Advanced Materials; for more information about the work, see Tech Talk. Graduate student Sunyoung Lee and Professor Krystyn Van Vliet have found a way to glimpse interactions between molecules on the surface of a cell; see the News Office for more information.