Shmuel Rubinstein, Professor of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, appointed a visiting professor of Applied Physics at SEAS

Shmuel Rubinstein will visit the Area of Applied Physics at SEAS. Rubinstein is a Professor of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (“HUJI”) where he has been a faculty member since 2020.  Prior to joining HUJI, Rubinstein was a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard, a Senior Scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and an Associate Professor at Harvard.  Rubinstein received a Ph.D. degree in Physics from HUJI.

Rubinstein’s research combines soft condensed matter physics with solid and fluid mechanics, aiming to elucidate dynamic processes that are highly nonlinear, far from steady state, and intrinsically irreversible. To achieve this, he develops experimental tools that lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of important and complex multi-scale systems and processes, specifically violent flow, failure, aging, deterioration, and damage. Examples of interest include the lyrical disintegration of a smoke ring, the crushing of a beer can, the splashing of a drop on surfaces, the crumpling, fracturing, and fatigue of both soft and rigid matter, and frictional slip on a tectonic fault (or a banana). Common to all these phenomena is that they are ethereal, complex, and irreversible events. To probe such transient processes, his group develops innovative experiments and tools that enable their observation on relevant timescales. In collaboration with theoretical and computational scientists, he combines his group's experimental expertise with numerical simulation and machine learning tools to capture the full complexity of these phenomena.