Vancouver, BC
July 11-15, 2026
Kelly. Patricia and Manuel presented their work. Manuel presented a poster on his new Virtual Field Method, Patricia gave a talk on a new topic of modeling the effects of ICP, and Kelly gave a talk on modeling the shock tube and blast reflections on a mouse skull.
June 25, 2026
Pasadena, CA
It’s a huge privilege to see how well everyone is doing in their new positions. Beiijun, as a postdoc at Columbia, Brandon as a staff scientist at Livermore National Lab, Bibek as a named postdoctoral fellow at LANL, and Junning, former visiting student, is now a PhD student at Caltech.
Jume 18, 2026
Tingting left to start her group at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. I’ve very excited to see her group develop and grow. Best wishes on your new exciting journey as an Assitant Professor.
May 18, 2026
Congratulations to Dr. Bibekananda and Adithya. Looking good in Hopkins gold. It was also a great excuse to take the lab to lunch.
May 3-6, 2026
Denver, CO
It was a busy biomechanics conference for our group. Adithya attended his very first ARVO and gave a talk on the inflation test setup for porcine sclera. Patricia Sabin and I also presented posters on the STRAIN study.
March 25, 2026
Atlanta, GA
Our lab’s first attendance at the American Chemical Society. Anajli gave a great talk on the effect of network structure on the fracture behavior of LCE films.
Visiting Zheliang University and Tsinghua University
Visiting Rui Xiao and Zheng Jia at Zheliang and attending a liquid crystal elastomer conference. The funnest part was meeting with Rui and Zheng’s students and learning about their work. Thanks, Rui, for organizing everything.
In Tsinghua, I visited Huajian Gao’s newest institute and reconnected with old friends and met new colleagues. Thank you to Ran Shi (former visiting student at the Nguyen Lab) and Quan Jiao, JHU alumnus, for spending the day with me hiking the Great Wall, eating dumplings, and hotpot.
Atlanta, GA
It was wonderful to reconnect with colleagues at SES, catch up with former students and postdocs, and celebrate at the banquet. The awards celebration was very special. Thank you to KT Ramesh and Guy Genin for nominating me for the Rice Medal and other awards. Thank you to the students and postdocs of the NguyenLab for making it possible. Thank you to Sanjay Govindjee, Huajian Gao, and Yonggang Huang, Ellen Arruda, H. Jerry Qi, and many others for your support throughout the years.
The Nguyen Lab had our largest unplanned reunion at SES 2025. Aurelie Azoug, Arina Korneva, Hai Dong, and their students: Brandon Zimmerman and Zheliang Wang. In addition, Sanjay Govindjee was there, and it was special to celebrate my award with him. We also caught up with Adyota Gupta, graduate of both Berkeley and JHU. Yuefeng Jiang presented at his first US conference, and Tingting Xu presented her amazing work on optimization of LCE structures. It was an amazing experience that I will cherish for a long time.
