Soft Matter Hacker

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What we do

Focus on the understanding, design, and creation of soft materials and complex liquid microstructures in commercial products, biological tissues, and even soft robots.
Maintain strength in microscopy, for quantitative study of soft material structures, and rheology, for measurement of flow and mechanical properties.
Enable the development of novel active ingredient delivery methods for consumer products, respiratory delivery technologies for pharmaceuticals, and even new insights into environmental phenomena like thunderstorm asthma.
Work with industry and academic partners to understand complex fluid product and material performance and design novel complex fluid materials and products.
More background on our group and members can be found at our UNSW site and our About page.
Prospective PhD and honours students: check our Research Projects page to see where you might want to work.

Research areas - Project pages

Formulated product development and scale-up - Develop and evaluate innovative microstructured fluid products with biological and industrial relevance.
Rheology measurement and design - Novel approaches to understanding the microstructure behind commercial fluid flows and performance
3D printing - Use surprising materials to print three-dimensional designs. How will your new food, biomaterial, cosmetic, or coating behave when you try to 3D print with it?
Engineered nanocellulose - Harness bacterial producers of cellulose nanofibers to weave, template, and manufacture advanced materials.
Emulsions and their shapes - Emulsion droplets are used in vaccines, pesticides, cosmetics, and foods by dispersing one liquid, like an oil, in another, like water.
Cubosome and hexosome nanoparticles - Nanostructured liquid crystal particles with unique shape and biological function.

Recent articles - All publications

Agrawal, R., Spicer, P. T., and Tunon-Garcia, E., Connecting bulk rheology, structural transitions and heterogeneous flow in Pluronic F127 micellar cubic liquid crystals using rheo-microscopy, Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, (2025). pdf
Spicer, P. T., Hosseini, M., and Babayekhorasani, F., Complex fluid product microstructure imaging with light sheet fluorescence microscopy, Current Opinion Colloid Interface Sci.,101916 (2025.) pdf
Seider, W., Bhamla, S., Dunn, J., El-Halwagi, M., Hanrath, T., Hasan, M., Hedengren, J., Hirshfield, L., Lin, X., Maravelias, C., Piffarerio, M., Prescott, S., Spicer, P., Squires, T., Thomas, C., Tom, J., Vaeth, K., Wisniewski, E., and Zavala, V., Teaching chemical product design, Education for Chemical Engineers 52, 101, (2025). pdf
Kim, H. J., Li, K., Akdag, S., Zhang, C., Oh, J., Jiang, P., Spicer, P. T., Zetterlund, P. B., Saydam, S., Thin spray-on liners (TSLs) as surface support in underground mining: A review, Construction and Building Materials 470, 140432 (2025). pdf
Hosseini, M., Gresham, I., Prescott, S., Spicer, P. T., Responsive nanocellulose-PNIPAM millicapsules, Journal of Colloid and Interface Science (2025). pdf
Hosseini, M. and Spicer, P. T., Significant size change during bacterial cellulose capsule drying, Powder Tech. 448, 120275 (2024). pdf

Recent blog posts - All posts

Recent talks - All talks

Apr 2025 Storytelling using static images to portray dynamic events, Lecture in Chemical Engineering with Computers, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
Apr 2025 Images and Analysis, Lecture in Chemical Engineering with Computers, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
Feb 2025 Light sheet fluorescent microscopy of commercial and bacterial products, Soft Materials Group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Sep 2024 3D printing and microstructured fluid design, U. Liverpool, Dept. of Materials, Design Manufacturing Eng.
Jun 2024 Sparse fiber structure minimum powder mass + max rehydration: Intl. Fine Particle Res. Inst. (IFPRI) workshop
Jun 2024 Imaging, Structure, and Flow of Commercial/Biological Fluids: Plenary, Intl. Fine Particle Res. Inst. (IFPRI) AGM
Jun 2024 Arrested emulsion structures in gels and their surprising applications: 13th International Colloids Conference
Feb 2024 Bacterial cellulose in deep eutectic solvents: Australasian Colloid and Interfacial Science Symposium
May 2023 Bacterial nanocellulose production and post-processing, Princeton University Chemical Engineering
Feb 2023 Curiosity, disruption, and applications: Australasian Colloid and Interfacial Science Symposium
Jan 2023 Arrested emulsion structure, rheology, and flow at multiple length scales: Journal Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics Seminar Series video

Teaching - UNSW Sydney courses

CEIC4007: Chemical Product Design Project Thesis A
CEIC4008: Chemical Product Design Project Thesis B
CEIC6711: Complex Fluid Microstructure and Rheology

Biography

Pat Spicer received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1992. In 1997 he completed a PhD in Chemical Engineering with the Particle Technology Group at the University of Cincinnati. There his research focused on design and synthesis of colloidal and nanoparticle materials. After defending his thesis, he went to work for the Procter & Gamble Company, leading their Crystallization group in the Corporate Engineering Division and supporting the scale-up and manufacture of complex fluid products for all of P&G's product areas.

Recognizing the importance of fluid microstructures to product and process quality, in 2006 Pat formed P&G's Microfluidics and Structured Fluids group, responsible for development, characterization, scale-up, and modeling of microstructured fluids and processes. Utilizing broad capability in microscopy, microfluidics, and microrheology, the Mu Crew made significant contributions to all of P&G's liquid billion dollar brands and collaborated with many of the leading academic groups focused on soft materials and complex fluids. Key contributions include in 2000 the creation of the first top-down process for scaled production of cubosome nanoparticles, in 2010 the development of fundamental arrested coalescence models, and in 2012 the invention of responsive droplet technology for P&G's Hair and Fabric Care businesses.

After 15 years with P&G, Pat began work as an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. There his research focuses on the design and development of microstructured fluid materials by understanding their kinetic behavior. His areas of focus in the field include the understanding of particle shape effects on materials performance, interactions of soft matter with biological systems, and scale-up of soft matter manufacturing processes when attributes other than composition control product quality.

In 2020, Pat led the effort to fund, specify, and purchase rheo-SANS and rheo-SAXS rheometers for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, ANSTO, beamlines in Sydney and Melbourne.

In 2024, Pat developed UNSW's Fluids Foundry Makerspace, the first such space devoted to design, characterization, and prototyping of complex fluid products and materials.

He is currently Research Director for UNSW's School of Chemical Engineering and leads the new Chemical Product Engineering stream at UNSW.

A more flamboyant overview of Pat's career can be found here!