Jesse Zeldes, 2021 Society of Rheology/Soft Matter Kitchen Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Haverford College

I’m a rising senior at Haverford College, majoring in Astrophysics and Math. This summer, I’m excited to be working on the Soft Matter Kitchen project, creating educational content about the physics behind food. Cooking has always been a huge passion of mine, and I’m super excited to work in the world of science communication, which has long interested me.

When I’m not working on physics homework or planning my next elaborate cooking project, I can often be found playing board games, writing and performing sketch comedy, and helping out with the Haverford public observing program.

Internship

Host: The Society of Rheology

Project

Abstract

Rheology, the study of the flow and deformation of complex materials, can feel esoteric, but it plays a crucial role in our everyday lives. Many of the things that make our favorite foods distinct and interesting are actually due to important rheological properties. In this talk, I will give a brief explanation of the mission of the Soft Matter Kitchen program, which seeks to engage people with the fields of rheology and soft matter physics through food. Then, I’ll give a couple of examples of educational content I worked on this summer. You’ll learn what makes mayonnaise stable, how bread dough can be used to visualize the Weissenberg effect, and how to use the principles of rheological design to emulate one of the biggest food trends of the past few years. Along the way, I’ll explain a few of the important properties used to describe non-newtonian fluids, and explain why we care about these complex flows.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week One: Cooking Up Some Ideas

The first week of my Soft Matter Kitchen internship has been off to an exciting start. The late memorial day pushed the first day of the program to Tuesday, which started for me with the virtual intern orientation. During the three-hour program, I got a chance to meet the other interns, as well as the program coordinators. It was a great chance to get to know my fellow interns better, as well as to kick some butt in our virtual Pictionary game.

After an afternoon spent filling out forms, I finally got to meet my mentor, Arif, for a 6 p.m. meeting. Because of the virtual nature of this year’s internship and the ongoing effects of the pandemic, my mentor and I are separated by a 12 hour time difference! Though this does make finding meeting times somewhat challenging, at least the difference is easy to remember. For now, we seem to have settled nicely into a schedule of alternating early-morning and late-night meetings. One consequence of the large time difference is that I’m quickly learning how to manage my time and projects mostly independently. Our totally non-overlapping work schedules ensure that the expected value of the question-answer time delay rests around 8 hours. The best way I’ve found to work around this is to always have as many sub-projects going on as I can. That way, when I get stuck in one, there is always more work to do on one of my other ideas.

But enough about work schedules, let’s talk some science! At my meeting with Arif, I got my first taste (no pun intended) of the field of rheology. Unlike fluid mechanics, which studies idealized models of fluids placed in complicated flow behavior, rheology considers much more complicated types of fluids under simpler flow conditions. Perhaps most importantly, we no longer consider viscosity -- a fluid’s resistance to flow -- to be a nice constant. Instead, we consider how it can change as a function of the shear applied to the fluid, the rate of change of shear, or of time.

But Jess, I hear you saying, what on earth does this have to do with food? Well, dear reader, what an excellent question! The fact is that many of the foods we cook on an everyday basis have complex and interesting rheological properties. Take mayonnaise, for instance. When you drop a dollop of mayonnaise onto your bread, it mostly holds its shape, acting very much like a solid due to its very high viscosity. However, when you begin to spread it, the mayo easily spreads under your knife, flowing in a much lower viscosity state. This behavior, which is common in rheology, is that of a shear-thinning liquid. Our hope this summer’s to use connections like these to help bring the complex world of rheology to a broader audience and expose more people to the beautiful world of complex fluid flow.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the project, check out the blog here !

Until next week!

Cheers,
Jess

Week Two: Making Mayonnaise

My second week as an SPS intern is drawing to a close, and I feel as if I’m starting to get settled in with my new job and responsibilities. This week has breezed by, as I started to dive into learning some rheology, while also starting on my first project for the blog: an exploration of some of the rheological properties of mayonnaise. This project has given me a good taste (no pun intended) of the more experimental parts of my work. I got to make 6 batches of mayonnaise, each time making small changes to the process or ingredients, all while keeping a careful log of the rheological properties of each batch. It’s a far cry from my usual, improvisational cooking style, but it’s great to see the ways in which little changes to my process can have a big impact on the final project.

This being my second year of remote work, I’ve gotten good at finding ways to keep myself sane during long days of similar feeling work. With the world opening up a little bit more I’ve been spending lots of time working in coffee shops. Reading dense rheology papers is so much easier with a great cappuccino, and it’s amazing to once again feel like I’m a part of a world with other people in it, rather than a little research rat locked up in my basement 8 hours a day.

As I’ve started to build my own content, I’ve also been learning the style of educational articles. It’s a totally different style than I have written in before, making much more use of metaphors and back on the envelope calculations. It’s a fantastic challenge to try to make complex, often mathematical concepts accessible without sacrificing the validity of the explanation. In my reading, I’ve found lots of articles that focus on building educational content for classrooms, integrating pedagogy and ideas for experiments with their descriptions of physical concepts. Reading these articles has really opened my eyes up to the ways in which many popular science articles can fail to communicate the fundamental ethos of science of experimentation and questioning. I love the idea of finding a way to communicate science that brings the reader into the scientific process, asking them to form their own hypotheses and make their own way toward potential discoveries. I’m excited to work some of these ideas into my future projects this summer and to get started next week with my own educational article that we’re hoping to write summarizing the soft matter kitchen project.
Until Next Week,
Jess

Week Three: The Adventure Continues

Week three of the SPS program is officially in the history books. I’ve spent this week diving my time between a couple of projects and getting used to spending my days writing. I have really been enjoying the blend of research and writing that this project has allowed. I love the feeling of getting to condense and share the things that I have been learning right away.

Thinking so much about food in a scientific manner has also given me a new obsession: coffee. Though I always liked having a cup of coffee in the morning and cared about grinding fresh beans, my research on food rheology has led me down the rabbityest of all rabbit holes that is the world of specialty coffee. I have spent a truly inordinate amount of time this past week (both at work and not) reading the extreme levels of experimental precision that the specialty coffee world has come up with to get everything possible out of the humble coffee bean. This has ranged from everything from genetic analysis of bean varietals, to a fully developed, supercomputer-simulated fluid transport model which a team of researchers built in an attempt to understand the optimal pressure at which to brew espresso.

One of my favorite parts of learning more about coffee has been seeing how many hobbyists who otherwise don’t have a background in science jump in full tilt to the rigorous testing and experimentation. It has underscored for me how much people have an innate desire for exploration and curiosity and has made me want to do more to show people how to bring scientific principles into their everyday lives. In reading educational articles, I’ve encountered a lot of great discussion about how we can develop this desire to experiment in children, and I hope that some of the projects that I’ve been working on can help people find that curiousity themselves.

Until next time!
Jess

Week Four: Flow

What a week!
The 4th week of the SPS internship program has been a blast. The work has been going well, and my first food-related article just went up . Additionally, I’ve been starting to think through and plan my upcoming projects. No spoilers yet, but you can expect some more taste content in the next few weeks. During a long afternoon this week, I caught myself dozing off and looking at recipes on one of my favorite sites. I was about to pull myself back together and refocus when I realized that I had actually been reading something that could pretty directly connect to my work. It was a funny realization and made me appreciate how great this gig is for me.

Outside of work, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know the other interns at our weekly game nights. It’s been super fun to get to hear about people’s different experiences in physics, and what brought them to become involved in SPS. Hearing about all the different paths through physics that people have taken and are planning to take has been incredible, and has helped me look more broadly at possibilities for the future.

At our weekly SPS event this week, we all got to have a chat with Nobel prize winner John Mather. We talked about everything from career advice to the future of astrophysics in the age of low-earth orbiting satellites and got to hear a few funny stories from his early days at NASA.

Time for me to get back to work!

Until next time,
Jess

Week Four: Flow

Hi Everyone! I was alerted that this didn’t post properly, so I’m reuploading now.

What a week!
The 4th week of the SPS internship program has been a blast. The work has been going well, and my first food-related article just went up . Additionally, I’ve been starting to think through and plan my upcoming projects. No spoilers yet, but you can expect some more taste content in the next few weeks. During a long afternoon this week, I caught myself dozing off and looking at recipes on one of my favorite sites. I was about to pull myself back together and refocus when I realized that I had actually been reading something that could pretty directly connect to my work. It was a funny realization and made me appreciate how great this gig is for me.

Outside of work, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know the other interns at our weekly game nights. It’s been super fun to get to hear about people’s different experiences in physics, and what brought them to become involved in SPS. Hearing about all the different paths through physics that people have taken and are planning to take has been incredible, and has helped me look more broadly at possibilities for the future.

At our weekly SPS event this week, we all got to have a chat with Nobel prize winner John Mather. We talked about everything from career advice to the future of astrophysics in the age of low-earth orbiting satellites and got to hear a few funny stories from his early days at NASA.

Time for me to get back to work!

Until next time,
Jess

Week Five: Midsummer

Crazy to think that this summer is already halfway over. This past week has been a whirlwind, and I have worked on a number of projects from video editing to writing a new blog post about boba, to gathering sources for an educational article that we are starting. The weather around here has been absolutely insane, so I decided to take advantage of the job flexibility and take an extra day of work on Saturday so that I could spend the 100 degree Tuesday tubing down the river with some friends. Though working remotely has its challenges, it also definitely has some benefits.

Even though I’ve been cooking lots for work, it hasn’t stopped me from wanting to spend most of my free time cooking as well. This weekend, for my sister’s birthday, I decided to take on the project of making ramen from scratch. This meant making 2 kinds of broths, as well as tares (liquid flavorings added to the bottom of the bowl), aroma oils, noodles, and a couple of different toppings. All in all, the project was a success, though my soft-boiled eggs were so soft that they were rather hard to get out of their shells. I have gotten into such a habit of looking out for interesting rheology, that a couple of times I’ve found myself stopping in the middle of dinner to get a closer look at a fluid flow or try to measure the stretchiness of a cheese sauce.

Until next week,
Jess

Week Six: Rainy Days

This past week has been one of the rainiest on record in the Northeast, so I’ve been cooking lots to keep myself sane indoors. Six weeks into the program, I think I can officially say that rheology has corrupted the way I think about cooking almost completely. Yesterday, I caught myself at the last moment before sticking my hand into a hot sauce I was making to try to perform a standard rheological test for viscoelasticity where you try to create a strand of the fluid between two fingers.

At work, I’ve been working on a couple of projects at the same time. I’m writing another Soft Matter Blog post, which should be coming out shortly, as well as a couple of different kinds of video content. I’ve been teaching myself more about photo and video editing, and have found that I really love the process. There is something so satisfying about making small changes step by step, then getting to zoom out and see how they have compounded to make a huge change.

I’ve been starting to think a little bit about the end-of-summer presentations that we get to do. I’m super excited to get to present some of the work that we’ve been doing with an audience of other students and mentors. And I’m super excited to get to hear more in-depth about other student’s work. I always love hearing about other people’s work.

Until next time,
Jess

Week Eight: Nearing the Finish

This past week has been a blast. I’ve been working on an article about rheological design for the blog and enjoying getting to go through the testing process. For the article, I’ve been making boba drinks, and I’ve really relished the opportunity to make one of my favorite foods and get to call it work.

Additionally, I’ve started to work on my final presentation for the SPS program. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost over. This summer has really flown by. Working on the presentation has been a good opportunity to reflect on the work from the summer, and to realize how many things I have actually learned. Crazy to think that at the beginning of the program I barely had any idea what rheology was.

This weekend, I went down to visit a friend in Washington DC. It was my first trip out of my hometown this summer, and it was fantastic to see how alive the world felt. Got to eat a bunch of good food, and bore my friend half to death with my fascination with its rheological properties.

Until next week!
Jess

Week Nine: The Final Countdown

The ninth week of the summer internship is drawing to a close, and I’ve mostly been spending the time finishing up projects and preparing for my final presentation at the SPS intern symposium. My second article (about the science of boba milk tea) just went public on the blog , so feel free to check that out as well.

We have a last SPS intern game night tonight, and I’m very excited. The game nights have been fantastic this summer, allowing me to get to know the other interns in a context outside of meetings. It’s allowed the program to feel a little bigger than just my work, and I always enjoy chatting with the others and hearing about the cool projects that they have been working on. It’s also a great opportunity to show off my vast collection of games to play over zoom which I amassed in the early months of the quarantine.

I’m eagerly awaiting our virtual tour of NASA on Tuesday. I’ve been a little bit obsessed with NASA from the time I was a kid, and I can’t wait to use the tour to ask all the nerdy little NASA questions that have been stewing away in my brain for years.

Until next time,
Jess

Week Ten: Finale

Wow. I can’t believe the SPS internship is over. The past two weeks have gone by in a total blur, as I worked to finish up my last projects and get my presentation ready for the SPS symposium. The symposium itself was fantastic -- I got to present first which meant that the nerves were gone and I really got to sit back and enjoy learning about the projects that other people had done this summer. It was amazing to hear the incredible variety of things that people worked on from instrument design to outreach and education.

The internship has been a wonderful experience and has really helped me decide on what I want the next stages of my life to look like. I loved doing outreach work, and making educational content, and I think that I want to look for a job where these things play a crucial role. Whether it’s working directly as a teacher or in some other kind of science education position, this internship has shown me how much I enjoy getting to talk to people about science.

Now that the program is over, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks road tripping around the Southwest. I’m so excited to get a chance to explore a whole new part of the world and to just take some time to hike and be outside after a summer of working 8hrs a day on a computer at home.