Brunaugh Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences · University of Michigan
We study the rules of transport in complex, dynamic environments — and engineer therapeutic interventions that exploit them.
Airway mucus, microbial biofilms, drying droplets, freezing cells — the environments where therapeutics succeed or fail are heterogeneous, structured, and constantly changing. Our lab develops the physical theory, measurement platforms, and engineered formulations needed to understand these environments and act on them.
Understanding the environment
We map how drugs, particles, and biological structures interact with the heterogeneous, dynamic media that govern their fate — the spatial and temporal physics that determines whether a treatment works or fails.
Learn more →Engineering across domains
Every material choice in a therapeutic system propagates consequences across multiple physical domains at once — manufacturing, stability, transport, and biological activity. We design formulations and particles by holding the full consequence space present, not by optimizing one property at a time.
Learn more →Building new tools
We develop experimental platforms and instrumentation that capture drug and material behavior under physiologically realistic conditions — replacing surrogate measurements with direct observation at the scale where outcomes are determined.
Learn more →We're looking for curious, creative researchers.
Our lab welcomes graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars with backgrounds across pharmacy, engineering, chemistry, and biology. If you want to work at the intersection of physical science and biological complexity, we'd like to hear from you.
See opportunities →