Graduate student-worker David Meer recently won the People’s Choice Award in the Gallery of Soft Matter 2025 at the American Physical Society Global Summit for his video titled “Protean Droplet Dynamics in Porous Media”. The video highlights research in progress at the Eric Weeks lab, in collaboration with the Corey O’Hern lab at Yale. Their research explores how droplets move through porous media, with applications in carbon capture and storage, industrial groundwater pollution cleanup, and pharmaceutical production. The complexity of the topic increases significantly when considering “protean” droplets, which constantly change size. The research focuses on creating quasi-2D droplets (composed of water, tween surfactant, and dye) that are much smaller than the obstacles they encounter—typically only 0.1 to 0.3 times the size of a cylindrical pillar acting as the porous media. Through coalescence events, these droplets merge and grow; however, if they become too large, they break apart against the obstacles, torn by the background flow of silicon oil. As a result, the droplets achieve a final size distribution as they move through the chamber. The research aims to quantify these protean droplet dynamics by first studying breakup behavior as a function of fluid and collision properties.