Seminarer

Jan Skotheim is Professor of Biology at Stanford University and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical and Systems Biology. His research focuses on understanding how cells grow and how cell growth triggers cell division, a fundamental process with important implications for normal physiology and diseases such as cancer.

Skotheim leads an interdisciplinary research program that combines mathematics, physics, engineering, biochemistry, genetics, and cell and systems biology. His laboratory primarily studies cell-size control and the cell cycle using budding yeast as a model organism, with the goal of uncovering the molecular mechanisms that connect cellular growth to division.

He did his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 2004. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in genetics, cell biology, and systems biology at The Rockefeller University before joining Stanford’s faculty.

Anton Souslov is an Associate Professor in the Theory of Condensed Matter group at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is a theoretical physicist whose research focuses on soft matter, mechanical and optical metamaterials, active matter, topology, and polymer physics. He obtained his B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Florida State University in 2006 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Before joining Cambridge in 2024, he held research and academic positions at Georgia Tech, Leiden University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Bath.

His research explores how the collective behaviour and structure of materials can give rise to unusual physical properties. His work spans active materials, mechanical metamaterials, topological systems, and, more recently, topological photonics and structured optical fibres. His research has been recognised through awards and grants including an EPSRC New Investigator Award and a Royal Society Research Grant. At Cambridge, he continues to investigate how concepts from topology and condensed-matter physics can be used to design novel materials and devices with potentially useful mechanical and optical properties. 

Professor Ivan C. Christov is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics (by courtesy) at Purdue University. He leads research at the intersection of applied mathematics, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics, with particular interests in soft hydraulics, non-Newtonian fluid mechanics, multiphase and particulate flows, nonlinear waves, and computational and data-enabled science and engineering.

His research combines mathematical modeling, theoretical analysis, computation, and experiments to investigate complex fluid–structure interactions and transport phenomena, with applications spanning biomedical engineering, advanced materials, and micro- and nanotechnology.

Professor Christov received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2011, following degrees from Northwestern University, Texas A&M University, and MIT. His honors include the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award, the NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and the Richard P. Feynman Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Karen Mulleners is an associate professor in the institute of mechanical engineering in the school of engineering at EPFL. She is the head of the unsteady flow diagnostics laboratory (UNFoLD). She is an experimental fluid dynamicist who focuses on unfolding the origin and development of unsteady flow separation and vortex formation. Karen studied physics in Belgium (Hasselt University, previously Limburgs Universitair Centrum) and the Netherlands (TU Eindhoven). She received her PhD in mechanical engineering from the Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany in 2010 for her work on dynamic stall on pitching airfoils that she conducted as a member of the German aerospace centre (DLR) in Göttingen. Before joining EPFL in 2016, Karen was a (non-tenure track) assistant professor at the Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. 

Please visit her webpage for more details. 

Professor Anke Lindner is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the physics of complex fluids, suspensions, active matter, and fluid–structure interactions. Her research combines innovative microfluidic experiments, microfabrication techniques, and particle-tracking methods to uncover how microscopic dynamics govern the macroscopic behavior of flowing materials. Her work has advanced our understanding of phenomena ranging from non-Newtonian fluids and rheology to bacterial suspensions, flexible fibers in flow, and active fluids.

After studying physics in Germany, she earned her PhD from the École Normale Supérieure in 2000, focusing on interfacial instabilities in complex fluids. She subsequently held positions at ESPCI Paris and Université Pierre et Marie Curie, before becoming Professor at Université Paris Cité.

Her achievements have been recognized with numerous distinctions, including an ERC Consolidator Grant, the Maurice Couette Prize of the French Society of Rheology, election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the prestigious CNRS Silver Medal. More recently, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Rheology and serves as President of the European Society of Rheology.

To get more flavor of her research please check out her webpage. 

Professor Christopher MacMinn is a Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and leads the Poromechanics Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that brings together engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and earth scientists. His work focuses on the mechanics of fluids and soft materials, particularly how fluids flow through and deform porous materials such as soils, biological tissues, gels, and subsurface rock formations.

Professor MacMinn earned his SB, SM, and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked with Ruben Juanes on the fluid mechanics of geological carbon dioxide sequestration. He later held a postdoctoral position at Yale University where he worked with John Wettlaufer and Eric Dufresne, researching the deformation of porous and granular materials.

His research combines mathematical modeling with laboratory experiments to address challenges in energy, environmental science, soft materials, and biomedical engineering. Recent work from his group has advanced understanding of fluid-driven deformation, gas migration in soft materials, carbon storage, and multiphase flow in porous media.

To read more about him please check out his webpage.

Professor Jacques Magnaudet is a Senior Research Scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a leading member of the Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse (IMFT), France. His research lies at the forefront of fluid mechanics, with internationally recognized contributions to hydrodynamics, turbulence, multiphase flows, and interfacial phenomena.

Over the course of his career, Prof. Magnaudet has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of bubbles, drops, and particles in complex flows, including their interactions with turbulence, vortices, walls, stratification, and rotating environments. His work combines theoretical analysis, high-fidelity numerical simulations, and close collaborations with experimental researchers.

He is widely known for developing predictive models and computational tools for two-phase and turbulent flows, including the in-house JADIM simulation code used for direct numerical simulations of complex fluid systems.

Prof. Magnaudet’s work has had broad scientific and engineering impact, with applications ranging from nuclear safety, chemical engineering, and aerospace systems to ocean-atmosphere interactions, drag reduction, volcanology, and environmental flows. His recent studies on bubble path instabilities, stratified turbulence, and interfacial dynamics continue to shape modern research in multiphase fluid mechanics.

Professor Martin van Hecke is a group leader at AMOLF, Amsterdam, and a professor of physics at Leiden University. He got his PhD in theoretical physics in 1996 at the University of Leiden. Since then he has worked on a broad range of topics in flexible and frustrated matter combining experiments, simulations and theory. The common thread in all this works is the fascination for the emergence of complex behavior in seemingly simple systems.

After been awarded the Vici grant in 2011, he focused his research on mechanical metamaterials, from patterned elastic media to origami. In particular he has developed new design techniques to make complex metamaterials that straddle the boundary between material and machine, and that form complex patterns or can self-fold when compressed. Based on these ideas and supported by an ERC-advanced grant (2021), he is now exploring if and how complex materials – from metamaterials to crumpled sheets – can store and process information. He works part-time at AMOLF, running a single group at two locations and spearheading the AMOLF ‘Modern Mechanics’ expertise center.

Kari Dalnoki-Veress is a Faculty of Science Research Chair in Experimental Soft Condensed Matter Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University and an adjunct professor at the ESPCI in Paris, France. He is an experimental physicist with a passion for soft condensed matter and teaching. Dalnoki-Veress has received the Canadian Association of Physicists Brockhouse Medal, the Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from the Royal Society of Canada, the American Physical Society Division of Polymer Physics Dillon Medal and was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2011. Dalnoki-Veress has served as Chair of Physics and Astronomy for NSERCs Discovery Grants, an Editor of the European Physical Journal E, Editorial Advisory Board of Macromolecules and ACS Macro Letters, and currently as a Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters. His research group at McMaster focuses on fundamental experiments in soft and living matter at surfaces and interfaces. Dalnoki-Veress is also CTO of MesoMat Inc. which exploits the world between molecular and macroscopic – the mesoscale – to enable material innovation.

Erland Ørbekk is a Norwegian technology and engineering leader with a strong background in advanced engineering, product development, and future technologies. He has held senior technical and leadership roles within the Nammo group, including positions related to engineering, development, and future technology initiatives. His expertise spans innovation-driven industrial environments, computational engineering, and high-technology product development.

In addition to his industrial leadership experience, Ørbekk has contributed to technical and research-oriented work within computational fluid dynamics and engineering analysis. He is also involved in board and advisory activities connected to advanced manufacturing and technology companies in Norway.

Herman Martens Meyer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oslo. Prior to starting his PhD, he completed an integrated Master’s degree in Applied Physics and Mathematics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). For his Master’s thesis, he worked on identifying subsurface turbulence using light reflected from a free surface. His research interests include wave turbulence, breaking waves, and free-surface turbulence.

Ahmad Rafsanjani is a Professor of Soft Robotics in the Biorobotics section of the Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). He received his doctoral degree in 2013 from ETH Zurich. Prior to joining SDU, he held postdoctoral positions with Daminao Pasini at McGill University, Katia Bertoldi at Harvard University, and André Studart in Complex Materials at ETH Zurich. His research group at SDU Soft Robotics develops adaptive, flexible systems inspired by nature, often realized through kirigami- and origami-based metamaterials and composite materials for friction-driven limbless locomotion and soft robotic perception.

Jens Eggers is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol, specializing in the analysis of singularities in nonlinear partial differential equations, with a particular focus on applications to fluid dynamics and hydrodynamics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009 for his contributions to singularities in free-surface flows. Eggers was awarded the Naylor Prize and Lectureship in 2023 for his contributions to the theoretical understanding of singularities of nonlinear partial differential equations.

Kjetil Lysne Voje is a Norwegian evolutionary biologist and researcher at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo. He earned a PhD in evolutionary biology from the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on how new species form, how species are related through evolutionary “family trees,” and how quickly organisms adapt to environmental changes. In 2008–2009, he retraced the South American journey of Charles Darwin to celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species.

Juliette Lacherez is a PhD candidate in the Théorie de la Matière Condensée group within Statistical Physics at Université de Bordeaux, working under the supervision of Thomas Salez and Yacine Amarouchène. Her research focuses on numerical approaches to complex physical systems, using simulations as a powerful tool to test theoretical models beyond experimental constraints. She primarily works with Langevin simulations to study nontrivial systems such as active swimmers in confined flows and colloids diffusing near deformable, fluctuating boundaries.

Anders Malthe-Sørenssen is a professor of physics. His research interests spans computational and statistical physics, the physics of geological processes, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. He has systematically studied how the frictional behavior of materials may depend on the contact history, for example, by demonstrating that the static coefficient of friction may depend on the acceleration of a block while coming to rest. More recently, he has addressed nano-scale frictional behavior for single contacts, sheets and metamaterials.

Ivar Svalheim Haugerud is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo. His research interests lie at the interface of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, soft matter, and chemical physics. In his PhD work, he studied how simple chemical systems driven far from equilibrium can give rise to emergent, life-like behavior, with a particular focus on non-dilute mixtures, phase separation, and active droplets. Using a non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework, his work explored the interplay between phase separation and phenomena such as excitability, self-sustaining oscillations, oligomer sequence selection, and the replication of sequence information, with the aim of identifying minimal physical mechanisms relevant to the emergence of life.

Christophe Eloy is a Professor of Fluid Mechanics at Centrale Marseille and carries out his research at the IRPHE institute in Marseille. His research explores a wide range of fundamental problems in fluid and solid mechanics—from fluid–structure interactions and hydrodynamic instabilities to animal locomotion, aeroelasticity, rotating flows, and even plant biomechanics—using a blend of theory, experiments, and numerical simulations.

Lars-Anders Carlson is an associate professor at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Umeå University. His main research interest lies in the drastic rearrangements of host-cell membranes that positive-sense RNA viruses carry out within hours of entering a cell.

Ambre Bouillant is a CNRS researcher, interested in phenomena that lie at the frontier between phase transitions, interfacial phenomena, and viscoelasticity. Her previous researches, mainly experimental, were focusing on the Leidenfrost effect, thermo-capillary stabilisation of thin films, the coalescence of viscoelastic droplets, and the condensation of vapours on deformable surfaces. 

Lorenzo Olivo Filippini is a student in the Graduate Program in Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PROMEC), working as a researcher in the areas of fluid mechanics, non-Newtonian fluid flows and free surface flows at the Laboratory of Rheology and Non-Newtonian Fluid Flows (ReoSul).

Guilherme Henrique Fiorot is a researcher in the field of Fluid Mechanics and an adjunct professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). He develops research in the theoretical, numerical and experimental aspects in complex fluid flows, whether with free surface or through porous media, especially those related to natural flows. 

Jisoo Yuk is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo. Her research interests broadly lie in interdisciplinary research and open to exploring diverse topics across soft matter, biophysics, and bio-inspired systems

Trond Helge Torsvik is Professor at the Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo and deputy director of Centre for Planetary Habitability. His research interests lie within the Earth’s system sciences, ranging from mantle dynamics to atmospheric cycles.

Rishabh Nain is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo. Prior to Oslo, he did an integrated masters in Physics from Mumbai university, followed by masters in Fluid Mechanics from Ecole Polytechnique, France. Followed by that he joined LadHyX, a Fluid Mechanics lab at Ecole Polytechnique for his PhD where he studied Origami structures in a flow.