To accomplish these goals, Luijten uses a few standard computer programs but most are new simulation methods developed by his own group. A few years ago, he reported on a breakthrough geometric cluster algorithm for use in Monte Carlo simulations.

"It was spectacularly efficient compared to anything else that existed and it has made its way into textbooks already, which is amazing," Luijten said.

In the project with Wong, Luijten's molecular dynamics simulations were able to gain insight into the thick mucus that forms inside a cystic fibrosis patient's pulmonary passages and that serves as a breeding ground for bacterial infection. Luijten's computational model predicted this process and aligned with results from X-ray scattering experiments.

"It would be more precise to say that we came up with the proper methodology to study this system to understand what's going on," he said. "Modeling can be simple and straightforward, but then how do you investigate this model, what are the things you have to study about it to answer what is going on in the experiment?"

While he appreciated hearing from parents of cystic fibrosis patients, Luijten said he knows any possible treatments are well into the future.

"This is not a medicine we created," he said. "It's some insight into what might be going on. I'm fairly convinced that that picture is true, but it's not the cause of cystic fibrosis. The cause is a genetic defect which we are not curing. But we understand that as a result of that defect certain symptoms happen and we understand why some of the current techniques that are used to fight those symptoms are not working. Given that insight, this is one way you could change the fight against the symptoms. But it would be a long road."

Even without feedback from the public, Luijten finds his research exciting.

"Once you get involved in it, there are so many things that are still unknown about the systems, whenever you look at them you encounter so many surprises," he said.

"It's only in the last 10 years or so that computers have become powerful enough to reasonably study these, which by itself is kind of interesting because if it hasn't been done in the last 10 years I don't have to worry that anybody has sorted it out already," he added with a laugh.

Luijten said his collaborations with materials science researchers mean his work is an interdisciplinary enterprise.

"The fact that the people I work with are all in materials science might hide the fact that it is actually interdisciplinary," he said. "I come from my side doing computer simulations and my training is in theoretical physics, so I often transfer ideas that I know from completely different areas of computational physics into this area of soft materials or complex fluids.

"I then try to combine it with these people working with a range of experimental techniques. In my view that's completely interdisciplinary, but in my view the whole department is interdisciplinary. You can see that in the affiliations of these people, all of them have affiliations in other departments as well: physics, chemical engineering, chemistry. It's no surprise that many of these people are at the Beckman Institute too."

Luijten came to Illinois in 2001 and joined Beckman in 2006 as a natural progression of his expanding research interests.

"I felt there was a lot of exciting stuff going on at Beckman and I'm always looking for challenges," he said. "I really got excited by the types of experimental results here. For me it is an important driving force, all these exciting topics that are so different from what I've seen before."