RESEARCH

STUDENTS (since 2003) - including co-supervision

MSc

Ciptanti Sisbandini

Basavaraj Katageri

Ushpal Thind

Xiaoyan Yang

Fanny d'Estaing

Jeroen Klein Lankhorst

Folkert de Koning

Wouter Dierckx

Bin Sun

Laurence Jennings Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan

Dharani Sundara Rajan

Sitara Vedaraman

Cindhuja Chockalingam
Benjamin Klemm
Aaditya Suratkar
Bianca Vijai Visveshcumar
Alexandra Maier
Srigopal Krishna Dasara
Reshma Shirish Kalvade
Milagros C. Pantin
Ioannis Katris

STATEMENT

My research activities in the field of Functional Soft Matter focus on fundamental aspects of self-assembled, nano-structured (polymer) systems that exhibit a passive function (i.e., transport of hydrogen due to film structure in a fuel cell membrane) or are active systems, that is, they respond strongly, usually mechanically, to external fields. Among the passive self-assembled systems that I study, you will find rigid polyelectrolytes, discotic liquid crystals, organogels, vesicles and block copolymer worm-like micelles. Active & responsive soft systems is the direction that I am mainly focusing on but both research areas are obviously interconnected and I build on my expertise on passive systems to develop and study novel active systems. In this respect, electrostatic interactions and confinement effects play a major role on the behavior of passive systems and can be used as tools for structure formation and tuning of characteristic time response of a given system.

Since Soft Matter responds strongly to external fields, the possibilities for formulating novel active soft systems are enormous. Many different mechanisms or combinations of mechanisms can be addressed such as the alignment of molecules or supramolecular structures with an external field, molecular conformation changes due to absorption of light, volume phase transitions of polyelectrolyte gels, etc. Irrespective of the mechanisms of actuation, I tend to focus on self-assembled systems, i.e. micelles or soft gels, that respond mechanically to external fields. The amplitude of actuation in these systems can, in principle, take place at length scales ranging from hundreds of microns down to nanometers and their understanding paves the way for their possible integration in lab-on-a-chip devices, their use as soft valves and pumps or soft tools to interact with living cells.

In recent years, I focus mostly on responsive biocompatible self-assembled structures in a bio-medical context.

Post-Doc

Artemi Mironov

Plamen Malchev

Hayley Every

Denitza Lambreva

Alexander Korobko

Feng Li

Anika Embrechts

Alexandre Olive
Piotr Glazer
Alexandra Arranja

Qian Liu

BSc