Control at the Molecular Scale

Welcome to Dr. Martha Grover's Research Group


Welcome to the home page of the Grover Group at Georgia Tech. Our group's research activities in process systems engineering focus on understanding macromolecular organization and the emergence of biological function.

Discrete atoms and molecules interact to form macromolecules and even larger mesoscale assemblies, ultimately yielding macroscopic structures and properties. A quantitative relationship between the nanoscale discrete interactions and the macroscale properties is required to design, optimize, and control such systems; yet in many applications, predictive models do not exist or are computationally intractable.

The Grover group is dedicated to the development of tractable and practical approaches for the engineering of macroscale behavior via explicit consideration of molecular and atomic scale interactions. We focus on applications involving the kinetics of self-assembly, specific those in which methods from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics do not provide closed form solutions. General approaches employed include stochastic modeling, model reduction, machine learning, experimental design, robust parameter design, and estimation.

a AFM image of conjugated polymers (Persson);
b microscope image of darapskite crystals (Griffin);
c kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of self-organization in replicating polymers (Walker);
d Combining esperimental data with models to predict the composition of nuclear waste simulants (Maggioni and Kocevska)

Current Projects

  • Chemical evolution
  • Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
  • Polymer informatics for functional robust flexible electronics and photovoltaics
  • Nuclear waste separation

Grover Group News

March 2024 - Senior graduate student in the Grover Group, Rahul Venkatesh, received the Future Leaders in Polymeric Material Science and Engineering award at the American Chemical Society Conference. [LINK]
March 2024 - Graduate student in the Grover Group, Steven Crouse, was awarded the Roy G. Post scholarship at the Waste Management Symposium. [LINK]

November 2023 - Postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Rupanjali Prasad, giving her talk at AIChE 2023 where she won first place for both her presentation and for her abstract submitted to the Nuclear Engineering Division's Graduate and Early Career Investigations session. Grover Group PhD candidate, Steven Crouse, won third place for his presentation at the same session.
November 2023 - Former and current Grover Group members attending the AIChE conference in Orlando, Florida.


August 2023 - Martha Grover, Anna Erickson, and Henry "Pete" La Pierre receive $11.6 million in funding from Department of Energy to establish the Transuranic Chemistry Center of Excellence [LINK]

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