
Materials Science and Engineering
Biological Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
Van Vliet's PhD thesis research in the laboratory of Prof. Subra Suresh in the MIT Department of Materials Science & Engineering, investigated nanomechanics of crystalline materials via contact mechanics-based experiments and multiscale simulations. Her postdoctoral research at Children's Hospital Boston considered mechanics of proteases and growth factors relevant to vascular angiogenesis. These seemingly unrelated topics observe stress-altered chemical interactions that are confined at force-, distance-, and time- magnitudes below the nanoscale. She has served as an Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) since January 2004, initiating her research group as the Laboratory for Material Chemomechanics and directing the multiuser DMSE Nanomechanical Technology Laboratory. Her group studies chemical/mechanical coupling at metastable material interfaces including biological cell/material and ligand/receptor interfaces, as well as several nonbiological interfaces of greater structural symmetry, including supersaturated metallic alloys, amorphous oxides and polymers, and composites thereof. Her group seeks to develop both novel experimental platforms and computational simulation algorithms to study such metastable material interfaces, approaching Van Vliet’s long-term goal of validated prediction of biochemical functions stimulated by mechanical stress at the cell-material interface.
2004-present Director, MIT Nanomechanical Technology Laboratory (NanoLab)
2007 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering
2006 NSF CAREER Award
2006 Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award

The Adobe Flash Player plugin (version 8) is required to view the genealogy tree.
Download the plugin here.