Soft Matter Blog

Eleonora Secchi is currently the Group Leader of the bioMatter Microfluidics Group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She earned a B.A. in Physical Engineering, an M.Sc. in Nuclear Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry from the Polytechnic University of Milan. Her graduate research work focused on developing optical correlation techniques and their application to the study of biological and soft matter systems. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, working with Prof. Lyderic Bocquet on the measurement of water flow from a single carbon nanotube, which allowed her to answer a long-debated question on water slippage at the carbon–water interface. She was awarded an ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2016 to join the group of Prof. Roman Stocker at ETH Zurich, where she became interested in biophysics. In 2018, thanks to a Swiss National Science Foundation PRIMA grant, Eleonora started her research group. Her research aims to understand the physical mechanisms influencing the assembly and the behavior of bacterial biofilms.  Her group investigates the environmental factors and the physical mechanisms controlling bacterial transport, surface colonization, and biofilm formation in fluids, focusing on the biofilm matrix — “the dark matter of biofilms”. She exploits the precision afforded by microfluidics, combined with visualization techniques borrowed from soft matter physics, to access biofilm’s microstructure and rheology, with the ultimate goal of linking structural properties to their biological function.

Read Eleonora’s Emerging Investigator article ‘A microfluidic platform for characterizing the structure and rheology of biofilm streamers’

How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?

We presented a work at the interface between biophysics and fluid dynamics, with possible applications to soft matter systems. The Soft Matter readership has the perfect background to appreciate it and find further applications. 

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?

Biofilms are bacterial aggregates embedded in a self-secreted polymeric matrix. They contribute to the surge of antibiotic resistance, a “global crisis” according to the UN, and cause costly biofouling and biocorrosion in the industrial sector. Studying the physical principles controlling biofilm assembly and the emergence of their properties can lead to developing novel, universal strategies to prevent and control their formation. I am excited to contribute to this medical and technological challenge while recognizing how ambitious the aim is to find universal physical principles to describe biofilm, the most diverse and widespread lifeform.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?
Bacteria are capable of assembling a mighty physico-chemical shield to protect themselves and survive harsh environmental conditions, namely the biofilm matrix. The matrix varies greatly in its composition among different bacterial species, but it can generally be described as a polymeric gel with viscoelastic rheology. The field wonders how is the assembly of this gel-like matrix regulated and what are the mechanisms conferring to the matrix its unique physico-chemical properties.

Alexandra Zidovska is an Associate Professor of Physics at the Center for Soft Matter Research in the Physics Department at New York University. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara after she completed her undergraduate studies and M.Sc. at Technical University of Munich, Germany. She pursued her postdoctoral studies at Harvard University.  Prof. Zidovska held the prestigious Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellowship, was named Whitehead Fellow 2016 and is a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award and Michele Auger Award in Biophysics 2020. Her current research uses approaches from soft condensed matter physics and polymer physics to study the cell nucleus and its constituents, such as the genome and subnuclear bodies, in particular their dynamics and spatial organization. She is also passionately engaged in causes related to diversity and inclusion in physics and related sciences. Her lab has an impressive record of recruiting, training and promoting women scientists across all levels, and Prof. Zidovska is founder and faculty leader of a new group, NYU Women in Physics dedicated to providing a more welcoming and stimulating environment for women and those from other underrepresented groups in physics. Find out more on her lab website.

Read her article ‘Mechanical stress affects dynamics and rheology of the human genome’.

How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?

I am very excited to have our paper on the genome’s dynamics and rheology published in Soft Matter. It is a great journal showcasing the interdisciplinary nature of the field of soft matter by bridging physics, chemistry and biology. My group focuses on understanding the genome as a polymer inside the cell nucleus in live cells, which is research at the interface of physics and biology. Hence Soft Matter is a great place to share our results with the scientific community.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?

What I find most exciting about my research is also its most challenging part, that is, understanding the physics behind the dynamical self-organization of the genome and the cell nucleus in vivo. Inside living cells we can see first hand how nature relies on physical principles to carry out biological functions. In my group, we perform experiments on live human cells, obtaining measurements of physical parameters that then inform our physical picture of the genome and the cell nucleus. Such experiments are quite challenging, as their design is nontrivial given the complex nature of a living cell. Yet, that’s what I personally find very exciting, when we learn new physics directly from peering and poking into the cell.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?

In my opinion, one of the big questions in my field is to understand the non-equilibrium nature of the genome and the emergent phenomena it leads to. The dynamical self-organization of the genome affects all cellular processes via the central dogma of biology, hence its understanding is critical for revealing the physics of life. I believe that these living systems can teach us new non-equilibrium physics.

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

My advice would be, when identifying scientific questions to study, choose those you are sincerely passionate about and that make you happy. Your enthusiasm for the problem will then help to fuel your motivation and energy, even when you encounter obstacles.

Janne-Mieke Meijer is an Assistant Professor in the Soft Matter and Biological Physics group at the Applied Physics department of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Her research focuses on complex colloidal systems to discover the fundamental principles of how building block design influences self-organization and how to control the self-assembly process to engineer new materials. Janne-Mieke obtained a BSc. in Chemistry, a MSc. in Nanomaterial Science and a PhD in Physical and Colloid Chemistry from Utrecht University. She completed a postdoc at Lund University, and a Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Konstanz. She received a Veni personal grant from the Dutch Research Council in 2018. She can be found on Twitter @JenneMikie and Instagram @JMs_colloids.

Read her article ‘In-situ characterization of crystallization and melting of soft, thermoresponsive microgels by Small-Angle X-ray Scattering’.

How do you feel about Soft Matter as a place to publish research on this topic?

Soft Matter is an excellent interdisciplinary journal bridging physics, chemistry, and biology. It is a great place to publish and follow exciting works on these soft microgels that encompass features of both colloids and polymers.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?

I am very excited about the work we are doing on different aspects of colloidal self-organization. Thanks to advances in synthesis and versatile assembly methods we can now finely tune colloidal complexity in terms of interactions, ranging from repulsive to attractive, and from hard to soft, while at the same time we can achieve almost any particle shape. The biggest challenge right now is to bring together the expertise and control needed to perform the colloidal experiments that can become quite complex. It is our aim to have control all the way from the synthesis of the colloids to the detailed analysis of the forces at play.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?

The self-assembly of molecules, nanoparticles and colloids is key to many natural and engineering processes, yet we do not fully understand how dynamic pathways or selective recognition control the final assemblies and hence the bulk material properties. To understand this complexity, we need to answer fundamental questions about how force, shape and composition dynamically interact and find out when equilibrium and non-equilibrium states emerge. Experimental studies of colloids can help us unravel these complex fundamental processes, and ultimately identify the design rules. This will open the way for a next generation of particle-based materials but will also generate new and important insights for condensed matter and biology.

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

Find a research direction that you are passionate about, this will make sure you have fun in your day-to-day research, and make a career plan. Even though most of the time these plans will not pan out, I found that this is key in setting your priorities right.

For many years Soft Matter has showcased special collections dedicated to work carried out by researchers in the earlier stages of their research careers in our Emerging Investigator collections, most recently in our 2021 Emerging Investigators collection.

We hope that the soft matter community has found these issues to be valuable, both in the high quality of the articles and in drawing attention to newer voices in the community. The journal editors and Editorial Board consider these to have been highly successful.

In light of disruption to research programmes worldwide, we have taken the opportunity to reassess the format of this initiative, and we are now excited to announce the launch of the Soft Matter Emerging Investigators Series.

What is changing?

In place of a dedicated journal issue, Emerging Investigators papers will be published throughout the year. We anticipate the following benefits to this change:

• No fixed submission deadlines allowing more flexibility for authors
• Continual exposure of exciting work from early-career members of the community
• Greater emphasis and focus on individual authors and research groups

We hope for this to offer a better service to our authors and readers well into the future.

What is not changing?

While we will no longer dedicate a specific journal issue to our Emerging Investigators, all other aspects of this initiative will remain the same. This includes:

• Eligibility criteria (see below)
• A dedicated web page for published articles alongside our other collections
• Rigour and speed in peer review
• An overall objective to showcase the full diversity of cutting-edge research carried out from soft matter scientists in the early stages of their independent careers worldwide

What happens now?

The Soft Matter Editorial Office will contact nominated Emerging Investigators throughout the year.

Regarding eligibility, contributors must:

• Publish research within the journal scope
• Currently be an independent research leader
• Have not been featured as an Emerging Investigator in a previous Soft Matter Emerging Investigators article
• Have either no more than 12 years of post-PhD research experience in the year of submission when taking into account any career breaks

Do you fit the criteria above, and wish to be featured as an Emerging Investigator in the journal? Get in touch with us at softmatter-rsc@rsc.org