My research interests are in experimental soft condensed matter. We study a variety of classical many-body systems that have characteristic energy scales accessible at room temperature and that are internally characterized by mesoscopic length scales in between molecular and macroscopic dimensions. As a result, these soft materials are easily deformable by external stresses and fields, or even by thermal fluctuations, and have microscopic dynamics and structural features that can be directly imaged using optical-microscopy techniques and probed using light scattering; this enables addressing many open questions in equilibrium and non-equilibrium many-body physics. Recent research involves partially ordered fluids, or liquid crystals, colloidal crystals and glasses, and active matter. A recurring theme is the presence of defects in the order and how they sense and respond to the local geometry, the local environment and the system’s inherent activity. We are also interested in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamic instabilities, which we are studying using toroidal droplets.

Prof. Penta is an economic theorist with research interests in game theory, mechanism design and bounded rationality.  His current research, for which he obtained a 2017-ERC Starting grant, focuses on behavioral models of individuals' reasoning processes in strategic situations, on problems of model misspecifications in game theory, and on the impact of Digital Marketing Agencies on the auction formats most commoly used to sell online advertisement space.