Speaker Biographies

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.

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.

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.