I build at the seam between rheology and design — modeling how complex fluids climb a fiber by day, cutting a jacket pattern by night. Two trainings, one continuous curiosity about how matter behaves.
M.Eng. thesis (Corning-funded): accounting for the time- and stress-dependent properties of thixotropic materials as they move through narrow gaps. Combining microfluidic imaging with controlled processing and numerical simulations of flow dependent on properties at the time of deposition and gap size.
The design-side counterpart to the auxetic meta-textile research — the same parametric methodology made into a wearable piece. Exhibited at Art+Tech 2025: a body-mapped rubber shirt whose bistable structure is the garment's form.
B.S. thesis: translating the mathematical model of negative-Poisson-ratio structures into textiles that fit a real body — a problem of making the parametric model robust to non-ideal body-scan data and encoding the geometry into laser-cuttable files. Workshops with designers probed how the workflow lives inside a creative practice.
Undergraduate capstone collection focused on creating "modern heirlooms." Six masculine-wear outfits — ranging from tailored button-downs to bespoke suits to column dresses — conceptualized the dichotomy between garments we cherish and those we find aesthetically pleasing.
Classical Celtic tartans symbolize family lineage through color scheme and geometric pattern. This interpretation augments the textile's structure rather than color — using texture and sheen to create the motif.
Sustainable fiber work with Prof. Margaret Frey (lignin nanofibers) and Prof. Ali Tehrani (IONCELL processing & hydrophobic textile finishes) — surface chemistry meeting fiber form.
Classical Lucas–Washburn theory assumes a simple Newtonian fluid. Real coating fluids don't behave: their structure builds and breaks with shear, and they resist flow until a yield stress is exceeded. I built a model that keeps the physics honest.
A Cox–Voinov correction lets the contact angle evolve with capillary number, with a single matching parameter Λ tying the macroscopic front to contact-line dissipation:
The striking result: across all three gap heights, Λ ≈ 12 held constant — pointing to an effective matching scale rather than a molecular slip length.
The capstone asks what we choose to keep. Mass production has decoupled the garments we cherish from those we find aesthetically pleasing — heirlooms accrue value through age and association, while the merely beautiful is discarded as soon as the next trend arrives.
Garments built to be loved long enough to outlive the season that made them.
Six looks build a vocabulary out of masculine-wear forms — tailored button-downs, bespoke suits, column dresses — letting one tradition speak across the gender spectrum. Construction is the throughline: hand-sewn details and bespoke-style drafting, executed at the scale of a single garment rather than a production run.
The argument is that beauty designed to be kept doesn't have to look like the past — it just has to be made to last.
McDermott, M.J., et al.
Target: Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics
McDermott, M.J. & Ben, G.M.
Target: Journal of Rheology
McDermott, M.J. & Baytar, F.
Target: Journal of Engineered Fibers and Fabrics
McDermott, M.J. & Baytar, F.
International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 82(1), 2025
Baytar, F., Lan, A. & McDermott, M.J.
CLOTECH 2024 — 15th Joint International Conference on Innovation in Clothing, pp. 37–39, 2024
Verified DOIs upon publication.
A fiber under load, a fluid climbing a gap, and a seam taking the strain of a shoulder are, to me, the same question asked at different scales.
I trained twice at Cornell — first in Fiber Science & Apparel Design, then in Materials Science & Engineering — because I never accepted that the technical and the made had to be separate practices.
My research models the messy physics of real complex fluids; my design work puts material behavior under the hand at the scale of a single garment. The pleasure is the same in both: understanding how matter wants to move, then working with it rather than against it.
I'm currently completing a Corning-funded thesis on thixotropic capillary wicking, with publications in preparation, while weighing doctoral research and industry practice. I collaborate readily across groups and disciplines.
Download CV (PDF) ↓Talks at the intersection of materials science and design — rheology for makers, design thinking for engineers, and everything in the seam between.
Workshops and instruction in fiber science, soft-matter intuition, pattern-making, and computational approaches to material design.
Materials & process consulting for textiles, coatings, and functional fibers — plus design-engineering bridge work for product teams.