Manoj Chaudhury is renowned for conducting fundamental studies on the roles of energetic and kinetic processes on adhesion, fracture and tribological properties of polymeric interfaces. He is credited with helping to launch a new field of interfacial fluid mechanics with the publication in Science in 1992 of an article he co-wrote with George M. Whitesides of Harvard University. In that article, the two researchers described a method they developed to make water droplets migrate on surfaces by controlling surface chemical forces.
Chaudhury’s group has also made important contributions to the mechanics of soft materials. These studies combine molecular level investigations with continuum mechanics-level modeling to try to understand adhesive, fracture and tribological properties of surfaces. An important new discovery of Chaudhury’s group is a novel pattern-forming mechanism with soft elastic films that arise due to the competition between intermolecular and elastic forces in thin films. These self-organized patterns, once formed, can be permanently stored, which could have important applications in various lithographic and nanotechnology applications.
Chaudhury has published 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including the distinguished journals Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society and Physical Review Letters. His papers have received about 3,700 citations. He holds several patents, is co-editor of the textbook Surfaces, Chemistry and Applications, and is associate editor of the new journal Biointerfaces.
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