Materials referred to as soft matter encompass a ubiquitous range – including polymers,
colloids, foams that we encounter on a daily basis in products such as food, cosmetics, paints
and so on. Developing structure property relationships for soft matter continues to be an open
problem given the broad range of fundamental material signatures they exhibit and the
continual discovery and development of new materials. In this talk, we will discuss how
material physics of three very different soft material systems – colloidal assemblies, elastomeric
adhesives and microbial polymers – relates to their macroscopic properties of interest. In the
first part, we probe the optical and rheological properties of colloidal microstructures. Firstly, a
method of colloidal assembly for reconfigurable structural color at rapid time scales will be
presented. The method overcomes well known limitations of non-reversibility and long
assembly times of conventional techniques. Second, we form load bearing colloidal gels at
vanishingly low volume fractions using anisometric monomers – opening up an attractive
method to achieve finite elasticity with minimal particle loading. In the second part, we study
how the viscoelasticity of elastomers can be tuned to increase their ability to damp shear
induced vibrations – a property of relevance in reducing automotive noise and vibrations. The
study reveals an apparent universality of the topology of viscoelastic loss factor of amorphous
polymers and inspires the need to synthesize polymers with broad damping characteristics. In
the last part, we discuss how the associative interactions of biofilm polysaccharides critically
mediates the microrheology of mature biofilms – thereby leading to a simple physiochemical
method of biofilm disruption. Taken together, this talk will seek to motivate the audience on
how macroscopic properties of soft materials we see around us depends on and can be tuned
by a rich set of microscopic features.