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Christopher
Emborsky
cpe1@rice.edu
Abercrombie Lab, C-125, Ph (713) 348-2930 |
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"I am originally from
Indianapolis, Indiana. I have a younger sister who is now
engaged and working in Denver, Colorado for Halliburton as a
petroleum engineer. I also have a younger brother who is
graduating from Indiana Institute of Technology in Fort Wayne,
Indiana with his degree in computer science this year. As a
result of the removal of a large benign brain tumor, I am now
legally blind. I returned to school to be the first blind
student to graduate with my bachelor's (and eventually my
master's) degree from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The
connection between Walter and Sharon Sauer, one of his former
students, who was a professor and co-advisor on my master's
thesis committee, has brought me to Rice University in pursuit
of my doctorate. Loss of my vision was more of a blessing than a
curse as it led to me coincidentally meeting my girlfriend,
Mika, during graduate school at Rose-Hulman. She will be
starting her pursuit of a psychology and medical humanities
degree at Indiana University this fall." |
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Research:
I am currently working in two major areas. The first is the
development of an improved bulk water model using the
perturbed-chain statistical associating fluid theory (PC-SAFT)
equation of state. The purpose is to fit a sufficiently complete
model that captures anomalous low temperature behavior. Such
behavior includes the density maximum and isochoric
compressibility factor minimum. The second project is the
development of a chain stiffness contribution to a
self-consistent density functional theory (DFT) based on
Wertheim's first-order thermodynamic perturbation theory. This
recently published DFT, modified interfacial SAFT (iSAFT), was
developed in this research group and has shown impressive
accuracy predicting structural and interfacial properties of
several model systems. While this DFT has shown accuracy for
inhomogeneous systems, it will also produce accurate bulk
properties as it reduces to the well-known SAFT equation of
state in the homogeneous limit. With the DFT providing a single
modeling framework for both bulk and interfacial properties, an
accurate water model will be necessary for investigating more
realistic systems such as surfactants in an oil-water mixture.
Chain stiffness will be introduced through an additional
perturbation term that applies an appropriate intramolecular
bonding potential.
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