"The interplay between interfacial flows and biological or living matter presents rich and challenging physics with ample applications in biology, medicine and public health."

Hanneke Gelderblom is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The main topics covered by her research include fluid dynamics, capillary flow phenomena, droplet dynamics, biofluids, evaporation-driven self-assembly, liquid fragmentation and laser-liquid interaction. Key examples are micropattern formation in evaporating droplets and the deformation and fragmentation of liquid droplets by laser-pulse impact. She studies different types of liquids, ranging from water to liquid metals to biofluids such as bacteria suspensions. In her work, Hanneke likes to combine theory with experiments and numerics, and fundamental fluid dynamics with applications in industry, biology and health.

Future research will focus on capillary flow phenomena in (in particular) biofluids. Biological or living material affects the interfacial hydrodynamics and hence the behaviour of the fluid on the capillary length scale. Vice versa, interfacial flows could provide a means to control the motion and/or deposition of biological matter at scales where direct manipulation is impossible, which is of key importance for applications in medicine, for example.

Hanneke Gelderblom obtained her MSc in Biomedical Engineering at TU/e (2009) and her PhD (cum laude) in Physics of Fluids at University of Twente (2013) with a thesis that won several prizes.  Following this, she became project leader of an Industrial Partnership Programme focusing on ‘Fundamental fluid dynamics challenges in extreme ultraviolet lithography’, a collaboration between Physics of Fluids in Twente, the company ASML and NWO. Hanneke also did a short postdoc at Ecole Polytechnique (Paris). In 2016 she was awarded an NWO Veni grant to study the evaporation of living liquid droplets. She became an Assistant Professor of ‘Capillary phenomena in biofluids’ at TU/e in 2018.