“Understanding our surroundings is a crucial step towards improving them.”

Matias Duran Matute is Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Through his work, he aims at understanding and modeling environmental flows and how they transport material and subtances.  His research encompasses the transport of, for example, sediment, salt in coastal regions, marine debris, and dropets in indoor spaces. The ultimate goal is to improve nature around us by providing better predictions to make the best possible decisions.

In the course of his research, Matias has performed high-resolution numerical simulations of the Dutch Wadden Sea, which have made it possible to understand and quantify the transport and fluxes in the region. Supported by an NWO VENI grant, he researched the efficiency of vortices as transport media for sediment. He is further interested in mitigation measures for salt intrusion in rivers, mixing in stratified flows, self-organization, transport in coastal regions, and mitigation of airborn infection diseases.

Matias Duran Matute obtained his PhD (with honors) in Fluid Dynamics (2010) at TU/e on the subject of dynamics of shallow flows with and without background rotation. He also holds a BSc in Physics (2004) from the University of Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico and and MSc in Physical Oceanography (2006) from CICESE, Ensenada, Mexico. In 2011 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at LEGI, Grenoble, France, and from 2012 to 2014 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Texel, The Netherlands, where he still is a guest researcher. Matias is member of the Eindhoven Young Academy of Engineering.