Professor Lichter studies dynamics on the molecular scale. He is currently working on four projects.  With Prof. Chris Goedde of DePaul University they are investigating transport of polymers through the nanotubes. With Prof. Ashlie Martini of UC/Merced, they are designing molecular additives for stabilizing the viscosity of lubricating oils.  Together with undergraduates at Northwestern University, they are investigating how polymers, such as DNA, develop kinks, that is, sharp bends that are important in dynamics and information retrieval in DNA. Though they make extensive use of computation, their emphasis is on developing simple analytical models and finding closed-form analytical approximate solutions. They take very complicated problems, which may be too large even for numerical computation, and trim them down using physical insight and novel mathematics.