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Further Information
Biography
John Biggins read natural sciences at Cambridge University. He specialized in experimental and theoretical physics, and was the top ranked student in his cohort. He then did a PhD in the theory of condensed matter group under the supervision of Prof Mark Warner FRS, working on the exotic elasticity of a new phase of soft matter known as a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE). During his PhD he made an extended visit to Caltech to work with Prof Kaushik Bhattacharya on analogies between LCEs and shape memory alloys.
After his PhD, John won an 1851 Royal Commission Fellowship and traveled to Harvard to work with Prof L. Mahadevan on instabilities in soft solids and biological tissues, including creasing, fingering and brain folding. He then returned to Cambridge, first as Walter Scott Research Fellow at Trinity Hall and then as an early career lecturer in the tcm group at the Cavendish Laboratory. During this time, he explained the viral youtube phenomena of the chain fountain, and explored how surface tension can sculpt soft solids, leading to a solid analogue of the Plateau–Rayleigh instability. He also taught first year oscillations, and a third year course "theoretical physics 1."
In 2017, John was appointed to an Assistant Professorship of applied mechanics in Cambridge Engineering Department, where he teaches mechanics and variational methods. In 2019 he won a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship on "Liquid Crystal Elastomers, from new materials via new mechanics to new machines." This grant added an exciting experimental component to the group, and underpins our current focus on using LCEs as artificial muscles in soft mechanical devices.