Julia Ortony

Julia Ortony will join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty in January 2016. She earned her BS in chemistry at the University of Minnesota and her PhD in materials chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ortony’s research interests are in two main areas: the design and optimization of soft materials with nanoscale structure for important new technologies, and the development of advanced instrumentation for measuring conformational and water dynamics analogous to molecular dynamics simulations. By combining these thrusts, technologies ranging from biomedical therapies to energy materials will be explored with special consideration paid to molecular motion.