Prof. Dr. Eric Dufresne was a Professor of Soft and Living materials in the Departement of Materials since January 2016. He left ETH at the end of June 2023, he moved to Cornell University to continue his research there. We wish him all the best.
This website is stored in the ETH Web Archive and is no longer maintained.
Job Openings
Interested in helping us launch our new lab at Cornell? You can apply for a post-doctoral position external page here.
Research
Soft materials encompass the bulk of living tissues. Living organisms control the structure and properties of soft materials at a hierachy of length scales.
Soft materials are widely used as diverse engineered materials, from personal care products to energy-efficient electronic-paper displays. Due to their accessible length and time scales, soft materials are great model systems for fundamental experiments in condensed matter physics.
Bachelor's and Master's Projects
The Laboratory for Soft and Living Materials is pleased to offer a variety of master’s and bachelor's projects. Each project will be supervised by an experienced researcher and guided by Prof. Eric Dufresne.
A selection of potential projects is described at the following link.
We have packed all instruments and laboratory items and we are moving to Cornell University (https://www.cornell.edu/).
From July 1, 2023, we will be affiliated with the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering (https://www.mse.cornell.edu/mse) and Physics (https://physics.cornell.edu/)
Rob's paper "The generalized Clapeyron equation and its application to confined ice growth" is now published in the Journal of Glaciology - congratulations! The Clapeyron equation is often used to describe how stresses build up as ice forms. Here, Rob and colleagues explore the assumptions of this model, and determine how it breaks down under more extreme conditions.
Check out the paper to learn more about confined ice growth: https://doi.org/10.1017/jog.2023.28
Andrea's, Hendrik's, and Aleks' preprint is now on arXiv, describing a new surface passivation method for super-repellence of aqueous macromolecular condensates.
Our paper describes a way to counteract this by coating microscope slides with a thin transparent hydrogel that exhibits complete dewetting and minimal pinning of phase-separated droplets in aqueous solution.
Stefanie's, Rob's and Eric's paper on Strain Stiffening Elastomers With Swelling Inclusions is now published in Soft Matter.
Congratulations to all authors!
The paper provides a generic analysis of inhomogeneously swollen elastomers. Computation of the macroscopic effective stiffness, as well as an in-depth quantification of local stiffness maps allows for a further exploration of the novel design space of hydroelastomers.
For details: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2023/SM/D3SM00496A
Aleks, Eric, Gianna and Lotta attended the BML Cellular Matters Conference in Ascona, Ticino.
Aleks and Eric gave talks about phase separating proteins at the BML Cellular Matters Conference. Gianna presented a poster about the pancake-like morphology of the Golgi apparatus compartments and Lotta had a poster about the structure of biomolecular condensates.
Seminars and Talks
Our lab members are often present at conferences and seminars to share their most exciting science.
Click this link for a collection of talks and seminars that have been recorded.
