"Living biological materials are very special. They last for a lifetime, literally, through constant renewal and self-repair. They provide tremendous inspiration for new materials design."

Kees Storm is the Dean of the Department of Applied Physics & Eindhoven School of Education at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Next to this he leads the Soft Matter and Biological Physics group where the focus is on mechanical properties of biological soft matter: proteins, polymers, membranes, fibrous networks and, ultimately, tissues. The research focuses on their microstructure in relation to their behaviour. Through 'reverse engineering', mimicking Nature's design, Storm aims to design new materials with new, unexpected and lifelike properties using synthetic non-living building blocks.

In Storm's research multiscale modeling is crucial since phenomena in biological materials generally span multiple scales - both spatial and temporal. His group tries to cover the essential physics at each of these scales, with particular attention to tying them together into a single, coherent multiscale scheme. Topics in the program run the range from single motors and protein polymers all the way to tissue-scale finite element studies.

Cornelis (Kees) Storm obtained his master's degree in Theoretical Physics at Leiden University and earned his PhD in 2001 under supervision of Prof. Wim van Saarloos. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Institut Curie (Paris), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University. In 2007 Storm was appointed Assistant Professor at TU/e (department of Applied Physics and the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems). He received tenure in 2009 and became Associate Professor in 2015. In the second half of that year he was a visiting professor at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Since October 2017 Storm is Full Professor at TU/e, leading the Theory of Polymers and Soft Matter group. 

· Institute for Complex Molecular Systems

· Eindhoven Polymer Laboratories

· Eindhoven Multiscale Institute

Partners in (semi-)industry 

· Unilever

· DSM/Sabic

· TNO