(Photo by A. Ciarlo.)Ade Satria Saloka Santosa joins the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg as a visiting PhD student from Uppsala University on 1 February 2025.
Ade holds a Master of Science degree in Industrial Chemistry from Pukyong National University, South Korea, and has research experience at the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS).
During his PhD, he will focus on nanofabrication and e-paper technology.
(Photo by A. Ciarlo.)Mathilda Gustafsson joined the Soft Matter Lab on 20 January 2025.
Mathilda is a master student in Complex Adaptive Systems at Chalmers University of Technology.
During her time at the Soft Matter Lab, she will work on a project about tracking bacteria in sequences of microscopic images. In particular she will try to solve problems with overlapping bacteria using recurrent neural networks.
Anqi Lyu starts her PhD at the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg on 8 January 2025.
Anqi has a Master degree in Medical Bioinformatics from University of Verona, Italy.
In her PhD, she will focus on delineating how plasma factors globally influence endothelial cells, with emphasis on their roles in health, ageing and disease, by utilizing computational tools in combination with interdisciplinary approaches.
(Photo by A. Ciarlo.)Sreekanth K. Manikandan began working as a researcher at the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg on December 9, 2024.
He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics in 2020 from Stockholm University under the supervision of Supriya Krishnamurthy. His thesis, titled “Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics at the Microscopic Scales,” focused on finite and short-time fluctuations in non-equilibrium systems, as opposed to the large-time asymptotic properties studied within the framework of large deviation theory. One of the key outcomes of his Ph.D. research was the development of a method to infer entropy production rates directly from experimentally accessible trajectories in a model-independent manner.
Following his PhD, Sreekanth received the NORDITA postdoctoral fellowship for independent research. During this time, he expanded on his earlier work by developing generalizations of the inference scheme for entropy production and integrating it with machine-learning tools for practical inference of dissipative forces and entropy production from experimental data. Later, in 2022, he was awarded the Wallenberg Scholarship for postdoctoral research at Stanford, where he developed machine-learning-based non-equilibrium control techniques for targeted self-assembly and transport of biomolecular systems.
Currently he is interested in combining methods from Non-equilibrium Physics and Machine Learning to quantitatively characterize and control nanoscale biophysical processes.
(Photo by A. Ciarlo.)Janko Vrcek joined the Soft Matter Lab on 9 September 2024.
Janko is a master student in Physics at Chalmers University of Technology.
During his time at the Soft Matter Lab, he will work on Monte Carlo simulations of protein condensates.
Biomolecular condensation is a phenomenon where under certain conditions biological polymers like proteins or RNA segregate out of a solution into a condensate. Many cellular organelles such as nucleolus are considered to be biomolecular condensates. Disruption in the condensation can have serious effects on human health, causing illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. My research investigates conditions for formation of condensates from previously developed theoretical models such as Flory-Huggins theory. We do this by utilizing Monte Carlo simulations of polymer mixtures and comparing results with theoretical models, as well as experimental results.
(Photo by A. Ciarlo.)Erik Olsén started his postdoc at the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg on 26th August 2024. His research is funded by a Swedish research council internation postdoc fellowship with grant nr 2024-00439.
Erik received a PhD degree 2023 in physics from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. In his thesis he focused on optical particle characterisation of nanoparticles and submicron particles, with an emphasis on label-free characterisation methods.
The Soft Matter Lab will administrate the postdoc grant while Erik will be in the lab of Sabrina Leslie at University of British Columbia (UBC). At UBC, Erik will combine different image modalities with confined lens induced confinement (CLiC) to characterise different types of biological nanoparticles.