The demand for surfaces with new (stimulus-triggered) properties is becoming more and more prominent in many industrial branches. Nature appears to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration as many biological species display remarkable surface structures and chemistries, providing extraordinary properties.

Nadia Grossiord is a SABIC employee and Scientific Advisor of the research group of Stimuli-responsive Functional Materials and Devices (SFD). Her research interests lie in wettability and adhesion matters, polymer material science, functional and smart responsive surfaces, thin films and interfaces.

Nadia Grossiord studied chemical engineering at the École Européenne de Chimie, Polymères et Matériaux (ECPM) of the University of Strasbourg (France) and obtained in 2003 an European engineering degree, with a specialization in polymers. She subsequently completed a Ph.D. in the department of Polymer Chemistry at the Eindhoven University of Technology (NL), under the supervision of Prof. C. E. Koning, Dr. J. Loos and Prof. dr. J. Meuldijk. Her Ph.D. dealt with the study of electrically-conductive carbon nanotube-polymer nanocomposites prepared with a latex-based process. Between March 2008 and February 2009, Grossiord was a post-doctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Stefan Bon, at the Warwick University (UK) and devoted herself to the development of light food products and sensors using Pickering emulsions. From 2009 to 2012, she worked on ink-jet printing, process upscaling and life time testing of organic solar cells at the Holst Centre/TNO (Eindhoven, NL). Since 2012, she is part of the R&D division of SABIC where she has had several positions, all of them related to functional surfaces and interfaces. She is currently working on the study and development of functional films and high performance polymers.