Invited Speakers

Prof. Laura Alvarez

Dr. Laura Alvarez is an Associate Professor at the University of Bordeaux, and leads the Soft BioColloids group at the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal (CRPP, CNRS). She completed a joint PhD between the University of Bordeaux and KU Leuven on the dynamics of colloidal liquid crystals, followed by postdoctoral work at ETH Zurich on responsive, light-controlled active colloidal assemblies. Her research develops out-of-equilibrium soft-matter and bioinspired microsystems, using light, chemical gradients, and electric fields to program thermo-/electro-hydrodynamic interactions, active transport, and shape transformations in colloids and giant vesicles. The ultimate goal is to engineering functional, cell-mimetic microdevices and colloidal architectures. She served as an ESA consultant for Soft Matter and Biophysics, and currently runs microgravity experiments on giant lipid vesicles in collaboration with DLR (MAPHEUS 14,15&16). She is a beneficiary/partner of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network SynSigCell and has been awarded with ANR JCJC, and ANR PRCI, and SNSF Spark grants. She is an active member of the Femmes et Science association in France with the mission of normalise the presence of women in STEM and outreach about physics, chemistry and space science.

Talk Title: Non-equilibrium giant unilamellar vesicles

Prof. Paul Beales

Paul Beales is Professor of Soft Matter and Biophysics in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, where he heads the Functional Materials and Molecular Assemblies research section. Paul’s first degree is in physics, before completing his PhD in the Soft Condensed Matter Group at the University of Edinburgh (2005). Following postdoc positions in chemical engineering departments in the US (Princeton, Yale), Paul established his independent research group in Leeds in 2010. The group’s research interests primarily focus on engineering membranes and vesicles for biotechnology applications, often related to healthcare technologies. These include developing new tools for engineering artificial cells, formulating therapeutic delivery systems and using insights from some of these approaches to understand the design and function of biological systems. Paul is currently the UK lead of the UK-Japan ACROPATH project, which is developing artificial cells as novel tools for pathogen diagnosis. In 2025, Paul was awarded the Biological Physics Communications Prize by the Institute of Physics Biological Physics Group.

Talk title: Engineering Hybrid Membranes as Durable Functional Interfaces for Biotechnology and Artificial Cells

Dr Claudia Bonfio

Claudia completed her PhD in Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Trento (IT), working on the origin and catalytic activity of ancient proteins. Later, as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow and 1851 Research Fellow, she moved to Cambridge, where she looked into the chemical origin of cell membrane signalling. In 2021, she started her independent research career at ISIS in Strasbourg before moving back to the University of Cambridge in 2024 as a University Associate Professor following the award of an ERC Starting Grant and a UKRI Future Leader Fellowship. Her group is interested in designing and developing functional primitive cells capable of Darwinian evolution.

Talk title: The shape of early life: primitive cells, primitive compartments

Dr Claudia Contini

Claudia is an Assistant Professor in Biotechnology and Engineering Biology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London. Her research group focuses on bottom-up synthetic biology, membrane biophysics, and biohybrid systems. She holds a Master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Padua, Italy, and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from University College London, UK. Following her PhD, she continued her academic career at Imperial as a postdoctoral researcher and was awarded competitive fellowships, including the ISSF and BBSRC Discovery Fellowship. Her work has been recognised with prestigious awards, including the L’Oréal–UNESCO UK Fellowship and the Italy Made Me award. She is Co-Director of the Association of Italian Scientists in the UK, an IUPAC National Representative, and a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Colloid & Interface Science Group.

Talk title: Artificial Cells: from Soft Matter to Cell-Like Behaviours

Dr Yuval Elani

Dr Yuval Elani is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Reader in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. Yuval studied Natural Sciences as an undergraduate (Cambridge, 2009) followed by a PhD in the Institute of Chemical Biology (Chemistry, Imperial College, 2015). After his PhD he held a series of fellowships working on various topics in biochemical engineering. He leads a diverse group of c. 25 researchers working on frontier research in biotechnology. His current research interests include biohybrid systems, synthetic cells, and autonomous laboratories for biomembrane design and discovery.

Talk title: Microfluidics, automation, and engineered biomembranes as enabling technologies in synthetic cell design

Prof. César Rodriguez-Emmenegger

César Rodriguez-Emmenegger is a Research Professor at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) in Barcelona, Spain. His research is driven by the vision of creating Quasi-living Materials: synthetic systems that recapitulate specific functions or behaviors we associate with living matter and harness them for biomedical applications.

Rather than focusing solely on adaptive responses, his work seeks to endow materials with functional agency, such as artificial phagocytosis to eliminate pathogens or endothelium-mimetic behavior to regulate blood–material interactions. He approaches living function as an abstract physical and organizational problem and reverse engineers the function rather than its biological implementation, across length scales, from the desired mesoscopic behavior to macromolecular building blocks whose chemistry, topology, and interactions encode collective, life-like function.

His group develops macromolecular systems whose tailored chemistry, topology, and intrinsic heterogeneity govern their self-assembly into functional biointerfaces and synthetic cells, spanning applications from antifouling and antimicrobial coatings to hemocompatible surfaces and phagocytic synthetic cells.

César studied Chemical Engineering at Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and obtained a PhD in Biophysics and Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics at the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Prague, under the mentorship of Eduard Brynda and Aldo Bologna Alles. After postdoctoral research with Christopher Barner-Kowollik (Alexander von Humboldt Fellow) and research stays in Cambridge (W.T.S. Huck) and the University of Pennsylvania (Virgil Percec), he established his first independent group in Prague with a GACR Junior Grant. He later led a junior research group at the DWI-Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials (Aachen) before joining IBEC in 2022, where his research is supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Talk title: Leveraging Macromolecular Topology and Random Heterogeneity to Design Non-living Predators

Prof. Petra Schwille

Petra Schwille is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, Germany, and Honorary Professor at the LMU Munich. She studied physics and philosophy in Stuttgart and Göttingen, and graduated 1993 with Diploma in Physics at the Georg August University, Göttingen. She obtained her Ph.D. in 1996 from the TU Braunschweig, with a thesis on Fluorescence (Cross-)Correlation Spectroscopy, performed at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, with Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen. After a postdoctoral stay at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, she returned to the MPI Göttingen as a research group leader, financed by the BMBF Biofuture prize, in 1999. In 2002, she accepted a Chair of Biophysics at the newly established BIOTEC Center of the TU Dresden. Since 2012, she is heading the department Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the MPI of Biochemistry and Honorary Professor of Physics at LMU Munich. Her scientific interests range from single molecule biophysics to the synthetic biology of reconstituted systems.

Talk title: The catalytic role of membranes in biological pattern formation

Prof. Mark Wallace

Mark Wallace is Professor of Chemistry at King's College London and Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. His research develops single-molecule and artificial membrane methods to understand how membrane proteins function, with particular focus on molecular transport across lipid bilayers. His group pioneered droplet interface bilayers, a platform now licensed to Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and has used this to develop optical single-channel recording and simultaneous single-molecule fluorescence imaging. Current work spans nanopore sensing, toxin and antimicrobial peptide mechanisms, membrane protein diffusion, synthetic cells, and the bottom-up design of artificial ion channels. He holds awards including the RSC Norman Heatley Award and the Gregorio Weber International Prize, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Talk title: Watching Translocation: From Botulinum Toxin to DNA Through Nanopores