# Sunghan Ro Assistant Professor of Physics ![Sunghan Ro](/sites/g/files/omnuum6476/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/physics/files/ro_sm.jpg?itok=gBojWUTS) location\_on Lyman 322 smartphone [617-495-1168 ]() email laptop\_windows [Personal website](https://www.sunghanro.com/) Sunghan Ro's research area is the statistical physics of soft and living matter, in and out of equilibrium. Recently, he has focused on studying collective phenomena in active matter, which consists of units driven out of equilibrium at the individual level. Examples of active matter include natural systems such as bacteria and animals, as well as artificial systems like colloids and robots. Due to the driving forces, active matter exhibits collective behaviors not seen in equilibrium systems, such as phase separation without attraction or polar order with a steady-state current that breaks time-reversal symmetry at a macroscopic scale. Sunghan and his colleagues have shown that the lack of time-reversal symmetry leads to exotic responses in active matter when subjected to external disorder or internal fluctuations. Specifically, Sunghan has shown that phase separation in active matter is fragile to disorder in the bulk and at the boundaries, and that polar order in active matter with discrete orientation symmetry is unstable against the nucleation of droplets aligned against the global order. His current interests include exploring other activity mechanisms, studying the response of nonequilibrium systems with different classes of symmetry, and designing microscopic rules of motion to control emergent macroscopic behaviors. - [CV](/sites/g/files/omnuum6476/files/2026-03/CV_SunghanRo.pdf "Sunghan Ro CV") > **Faculty Assistant:** [Liz Alcock](/people/elizabeth-alcock) - ## Role [Faculty](/faculty) [Researcher](/people/research)