Contact:

Elena G Strekalova
MIT
Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering
77 Massachusetts Avenue
room 1-382
Cambridge, MA 02142
USA

email: elenas@MIT.edu

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My research interests focus on understanding the physical properties of disordered mesoporous materials, such as cement, using density functional theory calculations.

I received my Doctor of Philosophy in Physics from Boston University, my Master of Arts in Physics from Boston University, and my Master of Science in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

As a member of H. Eugene Stanley's group, I also focus on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water in bulk, nanoconfined, and biological environments. Water is the most common substance on Earth, it is a mysterious and complex liquid which displays more than 60 anomalies! I use a 2D coarse-grained model and 3D spherically symmetric potentials with two length scales to investigate the anomalous behavior of water, including liquid polymorphism. I have become proficient in numerical analysis, tessellation analysis, Monte-Carlo simulations of square lattice models, and Discrete Molecular Dynamics simulations of spherically symmetric ramp potentials.

I am also an educator and a scientist working in the Museum of Science since 2002. I educate the general public on the biological optical effects of thin-films, and how they are related to the current studies on photonic crystals and radiative properties of computer chips.

Finally, I developed a 200-level Honors Course for the University of Massachusetts Boston, Science: in the Universe, Nature, Art and Daily Life. And I am thrilled to be able to teach it during the Fall of 2012.