Blending chemistry, computation, and curiosity, one postdoc studies how molecular motion shapes the durability of everyday materials.
Q | Write a brief introduction to yourself including the lab you work in and your research background.
I’m Pierre Kawak, a chemical engineer by training and postdoc in Simmons Lab at the University of South Florida. I was raised and educated in the Middle East. I use simulations and polymer physics to see how plastics move, stick, and break—making nanoparticle-reinforced rubber tougher and tuning polymer sequences to control brittleness.
Q | How did you first get interested in science and/or your field of research?
My path into science has two threads: teaching and truth-seeking. Early on, I discovered I love the high stakes of explaining ideas well—getting the facts right while tailoring the story so a specific audience truly understands it. That pressure to communicate clearly made me a faster learner and, honestly, a better scientist.
The second thread was finding solid ground in a messy world. Growing up in the United Arab Emirates’ cultural mix, I was constantly frustrated with “truth” feeling subjective. Then undergraduate thermodynamics offered something different: a neat, testable framework where cause and effect are explicit. That rigor—simple laws yielding intuitive, mechanistic answers—still anchors my work. Even as my questions got harder, the core remains: At the molecular scale, energy, motion, and contact—chains bumping, sticking, letting go—explain real behaviors.
Over time, I learned that mentorship in the lab rivals classroom teaching for impact. Science scales in two ways: through technologies we build and through people we train. Helping trainees grow—and engaging in advocacy and science communication—keeps me in the game.
Q | Tell us about your favorite research project you’re working on.
My favorite project tackles a century-old puzzle: Why do sprinklings of tiny hard particles make soft rubber so remarkably tough—stiffer, more durable, able to survive huge strains, like the “magic” inside tire rubber? I’m drawn to it because the answer turns out to be mechanistic and intuitive. In our simulations and analyses, the soft rubber behaves almost like water under stretch—it reshapes without changing volume—while the hard particles (carbon black or silica, essentially sand) can’t easily rearrange. As you pull, those rigid grains locally jam. The mismatch forces the surrounding rubber to do what it hates—expand volume—and that resistance amplifies the material’s overall strength. Push further and we see jammed clusters knit into load-bearing “micro-pillars” that carry stress and delay damage.
The payoff is practical. This picture suggests concrete “recipes” for particle type, spacing, and processing to hit performance targets with less filler or greener additives. Tires are notoriously hard to recycle. Extending their lifetime and cutting replacements is a win for wallets and the planet.
Q | What do you find most exciting about your research project?
Science is a long walk through failure punctuated by brief “aha” moments—and, if you’re lucky, the green light to keep going. Across my last two roles, the most energizing highs weren’t papers or talks. It was seeing our data unlock renewed or new funding. That external “yes” from reviewers says the question matters and the approach works—and it converts ideas into concrete capacity: time on computers, materials, and, crucially, support for trainees. After months of dead-end analyses, that validation is hard to beat.
The other peak has been building community that outlives any single project. At BYU, I founded and chaired a graduate council to surface needs, survey well-being, and push for better pay and conditions. At USF, I co-founded and chair a Postdoctoral Scholar Association serving roughly 200 postdocs with mentoring, workshops, and community. Beyond my campus, I help run a 500-member early-career polymer physics network and a virtual symposium that drew around 150 attendees over two days with prizes for talks and posters. Advocacy and outreach—from school fairs to public talks—round it out. Recognition like the NPA IMPACT Fellowship and the APS Career Mentoring Fellowship tells me this people-first work matters.
Q | If you could be a laboratory instrument, which one would you be and why?
A rheometer—the tool that twists and stretches materials to see how they flow and deform. It asks the questions I love: How does this respond to a gentle nudge, to a hard push Over long times? Rheometers turn messy molecular motion into clean curves you can reason about. In my work I do the computational version: perturb a simulated material, watch chains rearrange, and read out stress and relaxation. I’m happiest sweeping conditions and mapping the tipping points where behavior flips—then translating those rules into simple design knobs for collaborators. Also, rheometers are unpretentious: no gold-plated optics, just torque, time, and truth. That’s my vibe.
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