Jordan L. Shivers

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I am a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I am jointly mentored by Suri Vaikuntanathan and Aaron Dinner. Previously, I was supported by a Kadanoff-Rice Fellowship. I am broadly interested in the physics and engineering of active soft and biological matter.

I received a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Rice University in 2022, under the supervision of Fred MacKintosh, where I used theoretical and computational tools from soft matter and statistical physics to understand and predict the behavior of complex biological materials.

In 2016, I received a B.S.E. with honors in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Princeton University, where I worked with Cliff Brangwynne to develop an experimental tool for characterizing the soft matter physics of membraneless organelles in the roundworm C. elegans.

news

Nov 2023 On Nov. 24, I gave a talk at the Isaac Newton Institute entitled “Dynamics and instabilities in growing fluid membranes.”
Nov 2023 From Nov. 4-26, I am visiting the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge to participate in the program “New statistical physics in living matter: non equilibrium states under adaptive control”.
Oct 2023 Our paper investigating slow dynamics in strained fiber networks is now published in Physical Review Letters.
Sep 2023 I gave a talk on Morphological transitions in growing membranes during the workshop “Mechanics of Cells and Polymer Networks” at the Banff International Research Station in Banff, Alberta, CA.

selected publications

  1. nonaffinity_dynamics.png
    Strain-controlled critical slowing down in the rheology of disordered networks
    Jordan L. ShiversAbhinav Sharma, and Fred C. MacKintosh
    Physical Review Letters 131, 178201 (2023)
  2. network_assembly.png
    Structural Features and Nonlinear Rheology of Self-Assembled Networks of Cross-Linked Semiflexible Polymers
    Saamiya Syed, Fred C. MacKintosh, and Jordan L. Shivers
    The Journal of Physical Chemistry B 126, 10741–10749 (2022)
  3. compression_stiffening_fancy.png
    Compression stiffening of fibrous networks with stiff inclusions
    Jordan L. Shivers, Jingchen Feng, Anne S. G. van Oosten, Herbert LevinePaul A. Janmey, and Fred C. MacKintosh
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, 21037–21044 (2020)
  4. poisson_chains.png
    Nonlinear Poisson Effect Governed by a Mechanical Critical Transition
    Jordan L. Shivers, Sadjad Arzash, and Fred C. MacKintosh
    Physical Review Letters 124, 038002 (2020)
  5. nonaffinity.png
    Scaling Theory for Mechanical Critical Behavior in Fiber Networks
    Jordan L. Shivers, Sadjad Arzash, Abhinav Sharma, and Fred C. MacKintosh
    Physical Review Letters 122, 188003 (2019)