Engineering faculty receives DARPA Young Faculty Award honors

Jairo Diaz Amaya, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology, was honored with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for his work conducting fundamental research in the fabrication and self-assembly of colloids—key elements of soft matter.

The DARPA Young Faculty Award is given to young faculty scholars conducting foundational research in the broad areas of national security and to support a portion of their career research initiatives for the Department of Defense. Diaz Amaya’s project will explore new technological routes to create functional materials.

“In my project, I am using a new soft matter platform where polymers and colloids direct assembly instructions across length scales” here, similar to the way in which life self-assembles, multiple molecules seem to provide dynamic instructions to create shape and function. We are not at the complexity of biology, but we are providing strong insights into what is possible,” said Diaz Amaya, who has been at RIT since 2021.

Understanding materials science from the molecular and nanostructure standpoint, researchers like Diaz Amaya seek to detail the behaviors of natural soft matter systems —the term used for materials such as polymers, colloids, gels and other liquid substances. 

Diaz Amaya’s background multiple disciplines including chemical engineering to material science, physics, and structural biology. He leads the Soft Matter Signaling Lab in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, where the team designs and develops novel soft materials to further explore their relevance to physical and life systems. His focus is about how colloidal platforms can extract fundamental principles to create functional materials.

Prior to coming to RIT, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University and the Advanced Science Research Center Structural Biology Initiative at the City University of New York. The combination of disciplines is the basis for his current work in exploring how materials evolve and change as well as how materials can be best used to create more advanced structures with properties that were otherwise unavailable.

Most recently, Diaz Amaya was awarded a grant from the DOD Advanced Research Projects division for “Osmotic signalers for functional materials” a three-year project to determine new technology routes and functions to create functional materials.