Speaker Biographies

Anne-Laure Biance (Université Lyon, France)

Anne-Laure Biance is a CNRS research director at Institut Lumière Matière, University Lyon 1. She develops an experimental activity on interfacial hydrodynamics, which includes drop dynamics, bubbles properties and surfactants, and nanofluidics. In both cases, she explores the coupling between molecular interfacial transport (ions, solutes, surfactants) and liquid flows.

P T Brun (KU Leuven, Belgium)

PT Brun received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from École Polytechnique, Palaiseau in 2008, his Master’s degree in Advanced Chemical Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2009, and his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Sorbonne University in 2012 for work on the dynamics and instability of viscous and elastic threads. PT then joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a postdoctoral fellow, where he specialized in interfacial fluid mechanics and instabilities. In 2014, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an instructor in Applied Mathematics. He moved to Princeton in 2017, to join the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 2024. In 2025, PT moved back to Europe and joined the chemical engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. His research is curiosity-driven, with a focus on the quantitative modeling of nonlinear fluid and elastic processes in complex soft materials, as well as the mathematical description of structure formation in inert and biological systems. His work is interdisciplinary, aiming to study pattern-forming instabilities to passively fabricate hierarchical and topological structures in a broad range of materials. His research is conducted hand in hand with experimental investigations of model experiments. With this perspective, he studies problems involving thin fluid films, viscous threads (3D printing), microfluidics systems, as well as elastic shells, swelling, and elastocapillarity.

Honors and Awards

Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research, American Physical Society, 2023
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, National Science Foundation, 2021
SEAS Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award, 2019
APS Gallery of Fluid Motion, Milton van Dyke Award Winner, 2017
APS/DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion Award Winners, 2015

Ivan Christov (Purdue University, USA)

Dr. Christov combines theory (advanced mathematical modeling) and computation (state-of-the-art predictive simulation) to answer fundamental questions in mechanics. His detailed mathematical analyses of complex engineering flow problems have yielded new predictive theories and rationalized poorly understood experiments across several areas of science and engineering, ranging from rheology and mixing of complex fluids to microscale fluid-structure interactions ("soft hydraulics") to interfacial instabilities and nonlinear waves. Dr. Christov received his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences & Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 2011. After postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University as an Assistant Professor in 2016. He was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) in 2022.

Olivia du Roure, (ESPCI & Université PSL, France)

Olivia du Roure is a CNRS senior researcher performing her research at the PMMH laboratory in ESPCI Paris. She is a soft matter physicist interested in problems of biophysics and fluid dynamics. She develops experimental research characterized by very well controlled experiments combining microscopy, microfabrication and microfluidics in close collaboration with theoretical physicists and biophysicists.

François Gallaire (EPFL, Switzerland)

François Gallaire earned his engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique in 1998 and a master’s in Liquids Physics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1999. He completed his PhD in 2002 at LadHyX on swirling flow instabilities and vortex breakdown. After six years at the Mathematics department of Université de Nice, he joined EPFL in 2009, founding the Fluid Mechanics and Instabilities Lab (LFMI). He became an associate professor in 2016 and served as teaching department director from 2018 to 2023. In 2019, he was named a fellow of the American Physical Society. His research focuses on instability theory, free interface phenomena and microfluidics, with a focus on their fundamental description.

Amir Gat (Technion, Israel)

Prof. Amir Gat leads a multidisciplinary research group at the Technion, exploring the dynamic interface between solid mechanics and fluid mechanics through analytical modeling, numerical simulations, and experimental demonstrations. His research interests include: (I) Metafluids – integrating principles of metamaterials into fluid dynamics to engineer fluids with multistable thermodynamic properties, enabling advancements in energy storage, harvesting, and cooling cycles. (II) Soft Robotics – focusing on fluid-driven actuation mechanisms and multistable structures for applications such as search and rescue operations and minimally invasive surgery. This work led to the founding of Spinodal, a startup developing soft robotic catheters. (III) Physical Neuromorphic Computing – leveraging fluid dynamics and electrodynamics to create self-assembling neural networks for energy-efficient computation and adaptive robotic control.

Samuel Hidalgo-Caballero (ESPCI & Université PSL, France)

Samuel Hidalgo-Caballero is a physicist specializing in soft matter, microfluidics, and metamaterials. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ESPCI Paris within the Gulliver Laboratory. His research explores systems at the intersection of physics, engineering, and chemistry, focusing on non-equilibrium phenomena, perception-inspired materials, and flexible fluid-structure interactions. Samuel completed his PhD at ESPCI Paris under the UPtoPARIS program, working on statistical mechanics, fluid mechanics and wave-matter interactions. He is the founder of the MimeCodr project, which develops materials capable of absorbing electromagnetic waves at next-generation 6G+ frequencies—an innovation that earned him the Grand Prize at the i-PhD 2022 competition.

Alejandro Ibarra (Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

My research focuses on utilizing the mechanical properties of materials and automated manufacturing techniques to fabricate structures such as soft robots or slender structures. Also, I am interested in studying locomotion in granular materials and exploring how we can learn from animals to optimize robot locomotion strategies. I hold a degree in physics engineering with a PhD in material science from the University of Santiago de Chile. In 2022, I joined the PMMH Laboratory at ESPCI in Paris as a postdoctoral researcher. Currently, I serve as a research associate at the ESMP Laboratory at the University of Luxembourg, participating in a collaborative project between the MSCA program and the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Luxembourg.

Kaare Jensen (DTU, Denmark)

My research centers on the convergence of biophysics, fluid dynamics, and soft matter, examining how physical principles influence intricate biological systems. From the mechanics of fluid flow in plants to the mechanisms of cutting and stinging, I integrate experimental and theoretical approaches to reveal insights that may inform the development of new engineered materials.

Anne Juel (University of Manchester, UK)

Anne Juel is Professor of Physics of Fluids at the University of Manchester and has been the Director of the Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics. She obtained her D.Phil from Oxford University in 1998 and was a post-doctoral fellow at UT Austin and Manchester before her appointment to a faculty position at the University of Manchester in 2001. Her research focuses on fluid-structure interaction and interfacial phenomena in complex fluids and soft matter. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an Associate Editor of JFM and sits on the editorial boards of Annual Reviews of Fluids Mechanics and PRSA.

Eleni Katifori (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Eleni Katifori is an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. After her undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of Athens, Greece, she moved to Harvard University, where she obtained her Ph.D. degree in Physics in 2008. She was a fellow at the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University in New York, until 2012, when she started a position as an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Goettingen. In 2015 she joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania where she has been since, and in 2023 also joined the Flatiron Institute in New York City as a Senior Research Scientist. Katifori’s research is at the interface of complex systems, soft matter, fluid dynamics and biophysics. She has worked extensively on problems inspired by (and related to) biological flow networks in animal and plants, thin shell elasticity, and more recently epidemics and mean first passage time problems.

Matthieu Labousse (ESPCI & Université PSL, France)

I am a theoretical physicist as a CNRS researcher and as a joint Professor at ESPCI & PSL University. My research is carried out in the laboratory Gulliver. I combine numerical, theoretical and experimental approaches to investigate the physics of self-organization in complex systems including, programmable active matter, microfluidics, DNA cryptography, Waves and memory.

Philippe Marmottant (Université Grenoble, France)

Philippe Marmottant is Directeur de recherche CNRS in Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique, Grenoble (France). His research interest are in the physics of plants with the study microflows or cavitation bubbles. He also has an interest in the acoustics of bubbles at microfluidic or millimetric scales.

Matteo Pezzulla (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Matteo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research explores soft hydraulics, passive valves, and plant biomechanics, with a focus on understanding fluid-structure interactions in natural and engineered systems. His work combines theoretical, numerical, and experimental approaches, drawing from continuum mechanics and differential geometry. Previously, Matteo investigated thin-shell mechanics and morphable structures during postdoctoral positions at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Boston University (BU). He earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Sapienza University of Rome in 2016.

Amy Shen (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Amy Shen is the Provost and a Professor at OIST, Japan, where she leads the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit. Her research focuses on microfluidics, rheology, and a lab-on-a-chip technologies at the bio/nano interface. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the royal Society of Chemistry, and the Society of Rheology, and she has received several prestigious honours, including the NSF CAREER Award and a Fullbrightn Scholarship. Amy serves as an Associate Editor for Soft Matter and is a member of the editorial boards for ACS Sensors, Biomicrofluidics, and Physics of Fluids.