My name is Tyler Engstrom and I am a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). My group of mostly undergraduate researchers and I study aspects of elastic instabilities and elastodynamics in living and nonliving systems. We do this from a combination of theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches, and enjoy collaborating with biologists and physicists at UNC and elsewhere. Please feel free to contact me at [my first name].[my last name]@unco.edu if you have questions about anything on this site.
Recent Highlights
February 2025 – Tyler is named one of the 16 Cottrell Scholars for 2025, for his project proposal, Prestress-generated odd elasticity with applications to waveguides.
August 2024 – Tyler and collaborator Andrea James of UNC Biology are awarded an AREA R15 grant from the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health for their project, Developing new biophysical models of choroid fissure closure in zebrafish and foveal pit formation across species.
May 2024 – Group members Emily Chown and Zoe Bonasera graduate from UNC and will begin physics PhD programs at the University of Oregon and Arizona State University, respectively!
March 2024 – Zoe Bonasera wins first place in the DSOFT poster competition at the APS March Meeting! Zoe’s poster is a collaboration with Florian Sprinzing at Johannes Kepler University Linz and is titled, Can creasing patterns be predicted from a charge crystallization analogy? Also at APS, Indigo Peppard and Emily Chown co-present a poster titled, Creasing as a candidate mechanism of foveal pit formation.
Engstrom Soft Matter and Biophysics Lab 