Krystyn J. Van Vliet

Thomas Lord Associate Professor of Materials Science
and Engineering

ScB, Materials Engineering, Brown University, 1998
PhD, Materials Engineering, MIT, 2002

Room 8-237, 77 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
617-253-3315 (phone)
krystyn@mit.edu
Professor Van Vliet's Research Group

Professor Van Vliet's group studies material chemomechanics: material behavior at the interface of mechanics, chemistry, physics, and biology. She focuses on thermodynamically metastable surfaces and interfaces, in which stress-assisted chemical reaction kinetics are notoriously difficult to analyze via either experiment or simulation. The mechanisms of this coupling in cell-material interactions are incompletely understood, due to both biological complexity and lack of appropriate experimental and computational tools, but are key to design of materials that modulate cell adhesion for drug uptake and differentiation. Her long-term goal is to predict and modulate key functions of biological cells by drawing analogies to the coupled chemical/mechanical behavior of structurally simpler, nonbiological material interfaces and nanocomposites. These integrated experimental and computational efforts include three main thrusts: (1) chemomechanical mapping of nanocomposite surfaces including living cells; (2) mechanics of amorphous and viscoelastic surfaces and nanostructures; and (3) chemical kinetics in mechanically strained, nanoscale material interfaces. Her group has used this interdisciplinary application of mechanical and chemical forces to rapidly map environment-structure-property relations in engineered materials, and to predict the binding kinetics of individual molecules on living cells. These studies have shown that the stiffness of materials to which molecular ligands are tethered can directly affect kinetics of ligand-receptor interactions at cell surfaces.

Professor Van Vliet serves as the faculty supervisor of the DMSE Nanomechanical Technology Laboratory, has co-developed new undergraduate core classes, and has implemented new programs to retain underrepresented minority students.

Selected Publications

Walton, E.B., Lee, S., and Van Vliet, K.J. "Extending Bell's model: how force transducer stiffness affects measured unbinding force and kinetics of molecular complexes." Biophysical Journal 94 2621–2630 (2008).

Lichter, J., Thompson, M.T., Delgadillo, M., Rubner, M.F., and Van Vliet, K.J. "Substrata mechanical stiffness can regulate adhesion of viable bacteria." Biomacromolecules 9 1571–1578 (2008).

Krishnan, R., Oommen, B., Walton, E.B., Maloney, J.M., and Van Vliet, K.J. "Modeling and simulation of chemomechanics at the cell-matrix interface." Cell Adhesion and Migration 2 13–24 (2008).

Maloney, J., Walton, E., Bruce, C., and Van Vliet, K.J. "Influence of finite thickness and stiffness on cellular adhesion-induced deformation of compliant substrata." Physical Review E 78: 041923 (2008).

Constantinides, G., Kalcioglu, I., McFarland, M., Smith, J., and Van Vliet, K.J. " Probing mechanical properties of fully hydrated gels and biological tissues." Journal of Biomechanics 41:3285–3289 (2008).

"Chemomechanical Mapping of Ligand-Receptor Binding Kinetics on Cells," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104: 9609–9614 (2007) (with others).

• Graduate student Sunyoung Lee and Professor Krystyn Van Vliet have found a way to glimpse interactions between molecules on the surface of a cell (PNAS 2007); see the News Office for more information.
• Professor Van Vliet's research on testing mechanical properties of materials was the Nov. 4, 2005, cover story of Advanced Materials; for more information about the work, see Tech Talk.