Research

Past and Current Research

I have split the “Research” portion into three components. My past research had a different, professional goal. I started off as an experiemntal physicist but I have worked with applied mathematicians and engineers.

Currently, I am more focused on using research as a teaching tool for undergrads and high school students. I create appropriate research projects for motivated and sincere students to give them research experience, improve critical thinking skills, and teach them how to explore and investigate a research problem.

Recently, I have been exploring problems at the intersection of Math, Physics, and Deep Learning. These topics are timely and particularly suitable for undergrads and high schoolers for short projects.

Stress Chains in 2d Granular Systems

My primary area falls broadly under the label of “soft matter physics”. I have worked in three different areas: Granular physics (Ph.D.), Rheology and jetting dynamics of complex fluids, and fluid-structure interactions in the swimming motion of C. elegans.

My Ph.D. was on granular physics. I solved the highly complex and seemingly intractable inverse problem of finding contact forces on particles from photoelastic images. My Ph.D. work was considered groundbreaking, that resulted in my very first publication in Nature. A follow up work on jamming in granular media was published in Physical Review Letters as a Cover Article.

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Publications:

  • T. S. Majmudar and R. P. Behringer, “Contact Force Measurements and Stress Induced Anisotropy in Granular Materials”, Nature, 435 1079-1082, (2005) Download Paper

  • Majmudar, T. S. and Sperl M. and Luding S. and Behringer R. P. “Jamming transition in granular systems”, Physical Review Letters, 98, 058001 (2007) (Cover Article). Download Paper

  • G. Lois, J. Zhang, T. S. Majmudar, S. Henkes, B. Chakraborty, C. S. O’Hern, R. P. Behringer, “Stress correlations in granular materials: an entropic formulation”, Physical Review E , 80, 060303(R), (2009). Download Paper

  • J. Zhang, T. S. Majmudar, M. Sperl, and R. P. Behringer, “Jamming for a 2D granular material”, Soft Matter, 6, 2982-2991, (2010). Download Paper

Rheology of Complex Fluids and Jetting Dynamics.

Coiling of a fluid jet

  • C. J. Pipe, T. S. Majmudar, and G. H. McKinley “High Shear Rate Viscometry”, Rheologica Acta, 47, 5, 621-642, (2008). Download Paper

  • T. S. Majmudar and G. H. McKinley, “Nonlinear Dynamics of Coiling in Viscoelastic Jets”, arxiv Download Paper

  • Matthew Varagnat, T. S. Majmudar, Will Hartt, G. H. McKinley “The folding motion of axisymmetric jets of micellar solutions”, arxiv Download Paper

Locomotion of C. elegans in structured media.

Locomotion of worms in a structured medium
  • Trushant Majmudar and Eric Keaveny, Mike Shelley, Jun Zhang, “ Experiments and Theory of Undulatory Locomotion of Microorganisms in Structured Media”, Royal Soc. J. of Interface (2012). Download Paper
  • Xumo Pan (2025) Tokenizing Intelligence: Valuing AI Prompts and Models as On-chain Real-World Assets.
  • Haihong Pang (2024) Study of Image Similarity Measures
  • Boyoon Han (2024) Study of Cosine Similiarity in NLP
  • Sisi Qiu (2024) Data Analysis of International Student Enrollment
  • Aria Han (2023) Spiking Neuronal Networks on complete and random graphs.
  • Zhilin Chen (2023) Perception under Occlusion: Comparison between brain imaging studies and deep learning methods.
  • Ruinan Lu (2015) Graph theory analysis of chromatin genetic networks.
  • Olivia Chu (2014) Imaging and analysis of locomotion by shape deformation in Euglena.
  • Harshita Kajaria (2014) Nonlinear dynamics in financial time series.
  • Monty Liu (2013) Stress analysis of assembly of elliptical particles subjected to concentrated loads.
  • Sunjeong Bonna Kim (2012) Collective swimming of C. elegans.

Intel Science Competition: - Rishad Rahman, Bronx Science High School. Rishad recently graduated from MIT with a major in Computer Science. Project: Collective locomotion of Euglena Gracialis. We collected data on the swarming behavior of Euglena and analyzed the videos to examine the properties of their collective swimming.

  • Therese Chan, Bronx Science High School. Therese is currently an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, Com- puter Science. Project: Automatic detection of force distribution in granular systems - a Matlab implementation. We took an existing C code I had written while doing my PH.D. at Duke and converted parts of it in to a Matlab code to automate the process of finding contact forces in granular systems.

GSTEM Program:

  • Sophie Connor, Schoharie High School. Sophie is an undergraduate and a joint Math/CS major at Dartmouth. Project: Making Music from Chaos. We numerically iterated a few one dimensional chaotic maps like the Henon map and the logistic map and converted the outputs of those maps in different behavioral windows like the periodic, quasi-periodic, chaotic etc. into sounds by using a midi converter.

  • Penny Mian, Hicksville Public School. Penny is now at Georgetown University in Chemical Engineering. Project: Pattern formation in Belusov-Zhabotinsky reaction. We carried out experiments and analyzed pattern formation in this reaction.

  • Aileen Venegas. Aileen is now at George Washington University in Biomedical Engineering. Project: Network analysis of gene architecture in the chromosome. We analyzed connection network of gene organization in chromosomes from real experimental data (provided by a collaborator).

Pioneer Academy:

  • Tairan Ma: “Multimodal Machine Learning for Physiological Privacy Protection in Facial Videos”
  • Yichen Leng: “Data Analytics for Speed-Cubing Rankings”
  • Mohammed Ali: “Machine Learning for Memristor Networks”
  • Xiaodan (Amy) He: “Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Expression Recognition: Analysis of Current CNNs and Integration of AI Enhancement”
  • Terry Duan: “Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Intelligent Learning Tools”