Raj S. Mukkamala

I’m a 2nd-year chemical engineering PhD candidate at Caltech, co-advised by Prof. Julia Kornfield and Prof. Dianne Newman. My research blends polymer science with microbiology to develop living materials for precision agriculture applications.

I completed my BSE in Chemical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in 2022. During my undergraduate studies, I worked on developing polyolefin blends suitable for scalable conversion to carbon fibers in Prof. Valentin Rodionov’s polymer chemistry group and on simulating the dynamics of bottle-brush polymers in Prof. Michael J.A. Hore’s polymer physics group.

Outside of the lab, I enjoy playing tennis, hiking, and competing in mixed martial arts.

selected publications

Simulation and Analysis of Molecular Bottlebrush Dynamics in Dilute Solutions

Raj S. Mukkamala, and Michael J.A. Hore

Macromolecules , Jan 2024

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Molecular bottlebrushes consist of a linear polymer backbone that is densely grafted with side chains. They have received considerable attention due to their unique physical properties (e.g., very high entanglement molecular weights) relative to linear homopolymers. To date, their relaxation dynamics have received significantly less attention than their conformation and self-assembly. In this article, we make use of dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations with proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to study the relaxation dynamics of bottlebrushes in dilute solutions. The modes obtained by POD suggest that the backbone behaves identically to a linear chain and that the motions of its monomers are coupled to the side chains because of their grafted state. Although simulations of linear chains behaved as expected from the Zimm model, the scaling of the relaxation times of the bottlebrushes with Rg followed an unexpected scaling relationship τ ∼ Rg3.4. Our simulations demonstrate that the origin of this scaling law resides in differences between the scaling of Rg and the hydrodynamic radius Rh as the bottlebrush molecular weight is varied and that the Zimm model accurately describes dilute solutions of bottlebrushes.