Joshua David John Rathinaraj

Joshua David John Rathinaraj is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on soft materials, such as complex fluids and soft solids, that are crucial to many industries, including consumer goods, automotive, and oil and gas production industries. Specifically, Joshua’s work addresses the challenges of characterizing and mathematically modeling the mechanics and rheological properties of soft materials. He accomplishes this by developing advanced signal processing techniques to characterize the material’s temporal and frequency dependent rheological responses, as well as by developing governing constitutive differential equations for modeling the rheological properties. His most recent work involves using Gabor transforms to enable the characterization of the temporal and frequency responses of soft materials. This work extensively utilizes MATLAB, and it is now freely available through MathWorks and is being employed by numerous research groups. With the support of a MathWorks fellowship, Joshua plans to employ the Gabor transform techniques to distinguish viscoelasticity and thixotropy in complex fluids. He also aims to use neural differential equations for modeling complex phenomena, such as the yielding and thixotropy of soft materials.