My name is Tyler Engstrom and I am an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) and a 2025 Cottrell Scholar. 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.
My UNC webpage can be found here.
Some Recent Highlights
July 2026 – Tyler is awarded tenure at UNC.
May 2026 – Group members Ryan Otten-Reimer, David McCoy, and Hart Hancock finish their studies at UNC and will begin graduate programs at the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Wyoming, and CU Boulder, respectively!
March 2026 – Three group members present at the APS Global Physics Summit in Denver! Troy Singletary gives a talk titled, When tissues collide: A bilayer cellular Potts model of epithelial fusion. Ryan Otten-Reimer and Hart Hancock give posters titled, Creasing as a mechanism of foveal pit formation and A tension-based morphogenesis model of retinal fovea development, respectively. Also at APS, Tyler, Troy, and Ryan contribute an activity on mechanical metamaterials to Squishy Science Sunday at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
May 2025 – Group member Indigo Peppard graduates from UNC and will begin a chemistry Masters program at UNC.
February 2025 – Postdoc Troy Singletary joins the group. Troy recently completed a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stony Brook University, where he worked with advisor Carlos Colosqui on nanoparticle adhesion at fluid-solid interfaces. Welcome, Troy!
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 in Minneapolis! 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.
