Samya Sen

B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (2017)

Biography

Samya comes from Kolkata, India. He completed his Bachelors from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in Mechanical Engineering. He joined the Ewoldt Research Group in 2017 as a direct Ph.D. student.

Research Interests

I defended my Ph.D. this April! Address me as doctor, you shall.

I work with yield-stress fluids, focusing on thixotropic materials and extensional rheology, aimed at understanding the droplet impact behavior of yield-stress fluids. There’s a video at the bottom of this page (past the boring list of the few papers I have managed to churn out during my toil as a Ph.D. student). Take a look if you are interested.

I am also actively involved in maintaining and further developing the Rheology Zoo.

When I am not working in the lab, I like to believe that I can sketch. Doodle, to be fair. I love learning new languages. I can already impersonate a native in English, Bengali, and Hindi. I’m not half as bad in other Indian languages of Telugu and Sanskrit either. German, Spanish, and Latin are works in progress. I love to read too, books, comics, memoirs, anything. I like going on long walks, cooking, and finally, watching football. Because football is freedom (Bob Nesta Marley), and because Ronaldooooooooooooo!

If you are interested in striking up a more serious (or not!) conversation, and have literally nothing better to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon, feel free to casually browse through my detailed CV, short résumé, Google Scholar profile, or contact directly through email. Who knows, you may find what you’re looking for from life.

Or, maybe not. Nah, certainly not.

Selected Publications

1. S. Sen, A. G. Morales, and R. H. Ewoldt, “Viscoplastic drop impact on thin films,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics 891, A27 (2020). DOI link
2. S. Sen, A. G. Morales, and R. H. Ewoldt, “Thixotropy in viscoplastic drop impact on thin films,” Physical Review Fluids 6, 043301 (2021). DOI link arXiv

Sneak-Peeks into research: high-speed videos

Even if the science operating in the background may be convoluted and challenging to capture, these cool videos show the lighter side of life: fascinating slow-mo renditions of a fluid’s complicated behavior over extremely small timescales (of the order of micro-seconds).

Note the differences in behavior: only changing the thickness of the coating creates a vastly varying array of different fluid impacts for otherwise constant parameters.