Plenary Lectures

John Bush,
MIT

Hydrodynamic quantum analogs

John Bush is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. Having completed his BSc in Physics at University of Toronto, he went on to Harvard for his PhD in Geophysics, then the University of Cambridge for postdoctoral research at DAMTP. He joined the faculty of MIT in 1998, was tenured in 2004 and is now the Director of the Applied Mathematics Laboratory. His research began in geophysics, but then shifted towards surface-tension-driven phenomena and their applications in biology. For the past decade, his research has been focused on hydrodynamic quantum analogs.

Learn more

Frieder Mugele,
University of Twente

Drop-based energy harvesting: electromechanical energy conversion in drop impact

Prof. Mugele studied and obtained his PhD in physics at the University of Konstanz (Germany) with Prof. Paul Leiderer. During a postdoctoral research stay as a Humboldt Fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA (USA) he became interested in liquid-solid interfaces and confined liquids. As a research assistant at the University of Ulm (habilitation 2003), he extended his work to wetting of functionalized surfaces, including in particular electrowetting. Since 2004, he has been full Professor of Physics of Complex Fluids at the University of Twente (The Netherlands). He is heading a group of approx. 25 researchers studying fundamental and applied aspects of fluids at interfaces ranging from molecular to macroscopic scales. Research topics of the team include AFM spectroscopy in fluids, physical chemistry of solid-liquid interfaces, electrowetting, wetting of complex surfaces, clays, dynamic wetting, drop dynamics, two-phase flow microfluidics, confined liquids, nanofluidics, optofluidics, colloids, (micro-)rheology. Currently investigated with application areas include energy harvesting, CO2 storage, oil recovery, lubrication, and lab-on-a-chip systems.

Prof. Mugele has published more than 220 scientific articles as well as a textbook on electrowetting.

Learn more

Chiara Neto,
University of Sydney

Drag reduction and boundary slip at lubricant-infused surfaces

Professor Chiara Neto received her Masters of Science degree in Chemistry in 1998 and the PhD in Chemistry in 2001 from the University of Florence. Following a postdoctoral period at the University of Ulm and at Saarland University, in 2003 she joined the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Australian National University, as an Australian Research Council research fellow. In 2007 she was appointed Lecturer in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, where since 2019 she is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of Physical Chemistry.

Professor Neto's research interests are in liquid/solid interfaces, including both basic and applied aspects relating to surface engineering, chemistry, physics, and materials science. In particular, she is recognised for her work on structured polymer films, super-wettability surfaces, and microfluidics flows. Professor Neto is former President and founding member of the Australasian Colloid and Interface Society and she serves on the Editorial Board of Advanced Materials Interfaces. Professor Neto led the first team to be awarded the Bridge Hub Water Challenge prize in October 2020.

Learn more

Keynote Lectures

Saptarshi Basu ,
Indian Institute of Science

Functional droplet dynamics in the context of Covid 19

Saptarshi Basu is currently DRDO Chair Professor in the department of mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Professor Basu primarily works on multiphase systems especially droplets at multiple length and timescales. He is a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, ASME, Institute of Physics and Royal Society of Chemistry. Professor Basu is the recipient of DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship in engineering.

Learn more

Anne-Laure Biance,
Université Lyon 1

Electrokinetic  transport in sub-nanometric droplet

Anne-Laure Biance is a specialist of interfacial hydrodynamics. After a PhD under the supervision of D. Quéré on Leidenfrost drops, she has developed for now ten years an activity in iLM in Lyon dealing with the dynamics of droplets and bubbles, the stability of liquid foams, and the transport of liquid at the nanoscale (nanofluidics).

Learn more

Jens Eggers,
University of Bristol

Theory of bubble tips in strong viscous flows

J. Eggers is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol. He received his undergraduate degree (Diploma) in Physics from RWTH Aachen in 1987, and his PhD in 1990 from Marburg University. His PhD work was on cascade models of turbulence, under the supervision of Siegfried Grossmann.

Dr. Eggers' career has been devoted to the understanding of self-similar phenomena. He has made fundamental contributions to our mathematical understanding of free-surface flows, in particular breakup and coalescence of drops. His work is instrumental in establishing the study singularities as a research field fluid dynamics and applied mathematics. With Marco Fontelos, he has recently published a book at Cambridge University Press, which presents a unifying view of singularities in Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering, and aims to make the subject accessible to a wider audience.

He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Erfurt, Germany, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Dr. Eggers' most recent work concerns the spatial structure of shock waves in compressible gas dynamics, breakup of polymeric fluids, and singularities in non-linear elasticity.

Learn more

Kristina Davitt,
Université de Paris

Experiments attempting to unify the picture of wetting dynamics

Kristina Davitt is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Paris. She is particularly interested in thermally-activated motion and how small-scale heterogeneity and molecular layers affect contact angle hysteresis and wetting dynamics.

Kirsten Harth,
Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg

Wetting and vapor dynamics under drops impacting on hot plates

Kirsten Harth is a researcher at the Institute for Physics at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany. Her research interests span from fluid mechanics including drop impact on complex substrates, the influence of complex surficial properties on drop and bubble relaxation and dynamics of an-(isotropic) fluid membranes, over pattern formation and dynamics in liquid crystals to granular matter.

Her research is mostly experimental, with involvement in several experiments performed in micro-gravity, but also includes numerical modeling of bubble shape relaxation and flow in quasi two-dimensional membranes.

She received her Diplomas in Physics and Mathematics, as well as a Doctorate in Physics from the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, and spent almost 3 years in the Physics of Fluids Group of D. Lohse at the Max Planck Center and University of Twente, with major interest in the dynamics of impacting drops. In 2019, she returned to Magdeburg to pursue her own project on Drop Impact on Soft (Adaptive) Substrates of the Priority Programme 2171 funded by the German Research Foundation.

Learn more

Sameer Khandekar,
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Dropwise condensation on engineered surfaces (tentative title)

Prof. Sameer Khandekar is affiliated to the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, since September 2004. He completed M.Tech. program from IIT Kanpur, India (1998-2000) in Fluid-Thermal Engineering and subsequently earned doctoral degree from University of Stuttgart, Germany (2000-2004).

At present, Prof. Khandekar is serving as Head of the Department, Mechanical Engineering, and is an occupant of Sir M. Visvesvaraya Chair at IIT Kanpur. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

He is an Associate Editor of International Journal of Thermal Sciences and Interfacial Phenomena and Heat Transfer. His current research interests are in experimental microscale phase-change thermo-fluidic systems, evaporation, boiling, condensation, heat pipes and energy systems.

Learn more

Lou Kondic,
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Modeling and computing heat flow for evolving films and drops on nanoscale

Lou Kondic is a Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lou's research interests are modeling and computations in the fields of fluid mechanics and soft matter. Recently, he has been working on modeling fluid dynamics on nanoscale including thermal effects and phase change, as well as on formulating models for multifluid systems.

Learn more

Erin Koos,
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Effect of residual water on drying of suspensions in non-polar solvents

Erin Koos obtained her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (USA). She spent some time at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) where she was a postdoctoral researcher and then an independent group leader. She was appointed as an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering of KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2016.

Erin Koos is a member of the Soft Matter, Rheology and Technology (SMaRT) division. Her research interests include investigating solid-liquid-liquid systems including capillary suspensions. Her research as described their underlying physical structures and the influence on the rheology concentrating on the structural changes made by the solid fraction, contact angle, and external forces. Using rheo-optical methods such as confocal microscopy, changes in microstructure and rheological response including network structure evaluation can be linked to an applied shear. This has been extended to studies on the stability and microstructure of other complex fluids based on colloidal dispersions, emulsions and foams. Her research also concentrates on several applications for complex fluids including stress development in film drying and formulations for crack-free films, processing and stability of printed electronic pastes, and porous ceramics.

Learn more

Glen McHale,
School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh

Contact angles and droplet motion on slippery surfaces

Glen is Professor of Interfacial Science & Engineering and Director of Chemical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is a member of the Institute for Multiscale Thermofluids and leads the Wetting, Interfacial Science & Engineering Laboratory (WISE Lab). His research considers the interaction of liquids with surfaces and has a focus on the use of surface texture and electric fields to control the wetting and frictional properties of surfaces. This encompasses droplet-surface interactions and nature-inspired surface engineering, and includes liquid-infused and liquid-like friction-reducing surfaces, superhydrophobic surfaces, and liquid dielectrophoresis to control the wetting of surfaces.

Glen has written invited “News and Views”, highlight, emerging area and review articles for a wide range of journals covering superhydrophobicity, dynamic wetting, liquid marbles and drag reduction and has published over 200 refereed journal papers. He is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA), the Institute of Physics (IoP) and the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), and is a Member of the International Society of Bionic Engineering (ISBE) and a Senior Member of the of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Along with colleagues at Edinburgh, Nottingham Trent and Oxford Universities, he has developed a public understanding of science exhibition, Natures Raincoats.

Learn more

Ory Schnitzer,
Imperial College London

Rolling of non-wetting droplets down a gently inclined plane

Dr Ory Schnitzer is an applied mathematician at Imperial College London, with research interests in small-scale fluid dynamics and wave phenomena and the use of asymptotic analysis and singular perturbation techniques to illuminate fundamental problems in those areas. His current work is focused on modelling the dynamics of non-wetting and levitating droplets, self-propelling particles, flows over superhydrophobic surfaces, plasmonic phenomena and wave diffraction in media incorporating acoustic and electromagnetic subwavelength resonators. Dr Schnitzer completed his PhD in applied mathematics in 2014 at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, on the topic of nonlinear electrokinetic phenomena. Since then he has been in the mathematics department at Imperial, presently as a Senior Lecturer.

Learn more

James Sprittles,
University of Warwick

Bouncing off the walls: Computational modelling of gas nanofilms in drop impact

James Sprittles is an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick. He is interested in the computational modelling of small scale flows.

Learn more

Bernhard Weigand,
University of Stuttgart

Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of drop dynamics

Bernhard Weigand is currently Professor of Aerospace Thermodynamics at the University of Stuttgart. He is the director of the institute for Aerospace Thermodynamics (ITLR) at the faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Geodesy since 1999. After his PhD in Darmstadt in 1992 he joined ABB Power Generation in Switzerland where he worked up to March 1999. In parallel to his work at ABB, he obtained his habilitation at TU Darmstadt in 1997. In April 1999 be moved to the University of Stuttgart as a Professor. At the University of Stuttgart he was dean of the faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Geodesy from 2002-2006. From 2006-2009 he was vice rector for structure and organization at the University of Stuttgart.

He is the speaker of the collaborative research center SFB-TRR 75 since 2010 and the speaker of the international research training group GRK 2160 since 2016. His research is concerned with numerical and experimental studies of droplet dynamics and heat transfer enhancement. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering – acatech and an editor of the Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer. He is the author of several books, more than 40 patents and more than 500 papers.

Learn more

Thomas Willers,
Krüss GmbH

Which contact angle to measure? Status in academia and industry. An industry perspective

Thomas Willers studied physics in Cologne and Barcelona. He passed his diploma with distinction and received his PhD degree in experimental physics at the University of Cologne. In 2012 he joined KRÜSS GmbH at its headquarters in Hamburg where he is since 2015 head of the department for Applications & Science. He is responsible for the KRÜSS Application Labs as well as research and business-development activities. Over the years he has worked with numerous key companies and research centres in the field of coating, inkjet printing, wetting, foams, just to name a few, building solid academic and industrial experience in interfacial science.

Learn more