| Citation | Michael Cates is renowned for his theories of surfactant aggregates, polymers, colloids and other soft materials. Early in his career he created a model for the flow behaviour of viscoelastic surfactant solutions and developed a theory of layers of polymers adsorbed by one end to a surface. His later work has explained the structure and properties of the anomalous isotropic (L3) phase of surfactant solutions, and has given new insights into the flow and aging of emulsions, foams and other 'soft glassy materials'. He has made important advances in simulation methods to study fluid demixing, and developed new methods to predict the yielding and flow of colloids, and to address the physics of jamming. The unifying theme behind these wide-ranging discoveries is the use of statistical physics to address technologically important soft materials. |