Soft Matter editorial board members

Alfred Crosby, Editor-in-Chief

University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8850-8869

Alfred J. Crosby is a Professor of Polymer Science & Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Co-Director of the Center for Evolutionary Materials. His research interests lie generally in bio-inspired materials mechanics, especially topics including adhesion, nanoparticle assemblies, gels, thin films, fracture, hierarchical materials, and elastic instabilities.  He has received numerous awards, including being a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the American Physical Society, and his research has been covered extensively in the popular media.

Roberto Cerbino, Associate editor

University of Vienna, Austria

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0434-7741

Roberto Cerbino is a Professor of Experimental Soft Matter Physics at the University of Vienna, Austria. Before joining in 2021, he held a tenure for 14 years at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Milan, Italy. Roberto's research encompasses the structure, dynamics, rheology, and instabilities of active and passive complex fluids, with a particular emphasis on colloidal and cellular collectives. He is credited with inventing Differential Dynamic Microscopy (DDM), a technique that utilizes optical microscopy to extract multi-scale activity in complex fluids and biological systems. In addition to DDM, he employs a range of cutting-edge optical techniques and image analysis methods to gain in-depth insights into the behavior of soft materials.

Lorna Dougan, Associate editor

University of Leeds, UK

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2620-5827

Lorna Dougan is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Leeds based at the University of Leeds in the School of Physics and Astronomy, working on soft matter and biological physics. She currently holds a UKRI Frontier Research Fellowship (Horizon Europe guarantee for the European Research Council Consolidator Fellowship). Her research group is focused on the multiscale structure and mechanics of folded protein hydrogels and liquids and complex fluids.   

Ewa Górecka, Associate editor

University of Warsaw, Poland

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8076-5489

Ewa Górecka is a professor at the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on the study of liquid crystals, gels and nanoparticles using various X-ray diffraction and microscopic methods to study the structure of these materials at the nanoscale. She is also interested in the mechanisms of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in soft matter. Her latest publications concern the use of X-ray diffraction methods to solve the structure of chiral phases with limited positional order.

Guruswamy Kumaraswamy, Associate editor

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9442-0775

Guruswamy (Guru) Kumaraswamy is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Guru's research interests are in the area of structure-property relations in polymers and nanocomposites, waste valorization, and sustainable materials. Guru is primarily an experimentalist and his group uses tools such as rheology and small-angle X-ray and neutron scattering to probe materials' microstructure.

Sanat Kumar, Associate editor 

Columbia University, USA

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-2221

Sanat Kumar is currently the Bykhovsky Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. His research interests are in the field of polymers (nanocomposites, advanced capacitor materials, scattering methods) and biopolymers (protein-surface interactions).

Zhihong Nie, Associate editor

Fudan University, China

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9639-905X

Zhihong Nie is a Professor in the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Engineering of Polymers and Department of Macromolecular Science at Fudan University. Prior to this position, he was a tenured faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. His current research focuses on molecular and nanoparticle self-assembly, biomedical imaging and delivery, programmable soft materials, and microfluidics. He has received various awards including the NSF CAREER Award and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award.

Amy Shen, Associate editor

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1222-6264

Amy Shen is a professor in Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. Her research is focused on microfluidics and rheology of polymeric, surfactant, and colloidal systems with applications in biotechnology and nanotechnology. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Fluid Dynamics) and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Amy has won numerous awards including the NSF career award and the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. Amy was also a Fulbright Scholar in 2013.

Lixin Wu, Associate editor

Jilin University, China

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4735-8558

Lixin Wu is currently the outstanding Tang Auching Professor in College of Chemistry at Jilin University and a PI of the State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials of China. He is also a member of Colloids and Interface Chemistry Division of the Chinese Chemistry Society. His research interests mainly focus on the fabrication and structure studies of supramolecular hybrid assemblies comprising of inorganic nanoclusters and organic amphiphiles. By regulating non-covalent interactions and incorporating functional units, his group would like to develop flexible framework structures and those composites toward precisely nano colloid-separation, near-infrared photothermal transformation, and environment friendly catalytic and bio-applicable materials.

Emanuela Zaccarelli, Associate editor

Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0032-8906

Emanuela Zaccarelli is a Director of Research  at the Institute of Complex Systems of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), based at the Physics Department of the Sapienza University of Rome. After graduating in Physics at the same University in 1999, she obtained a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University College of Dublin, Ireland in 2002. She was the first recipient of the Soft Matter Lectureship in 2009 for her studies on gels and glasses in colloidal suspensions. She has an established numerical expertise on phase behavior and dynamics of complex fluids, including colloids, polymers, proteins and patchy particles. After receiving an ERC Consolidator grant in 2015, she started to develop a multi-scale model for realistic microgels and hydrogels in connection with several experimental groups around the world.

Xuehua Zhang, Associate editor

University of Alberta, Canada

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6093-5324

Professor Xuehua Zhang completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and in September 2017 was appointed a Professor of Chemical and Materials Engineering at University of Alberta. Her research topics cover surface nanobubbles and nanodroplets, microwetting, surface forces, spontaneous emulsification, microextraction, self-assembly of colloids, evaporation and dissolution of multicomponent droplets, and bubble dynamics in catalytic reactions. 

David Díaz Díaz, Editorial board member

University of La Laguna, Spain

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0557-3364

David received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2002 from the University of La Laguna (ULL). He then joined Prof. Finn’s group at The Scripps Research Institute (San Diego, USA) as Research Associate. Since 2006, he has held several positions in academia and industry:

• Ramón y Cajal researcher, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain (2006)
• Sr. Chemist, The Dow Chemical Company, Switzerland (2007)
• Tenured Scientist, The Spanish & National Research Council, Spain (2009)
• Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher, University of Regensburg, Germany (2010)
• DFG Heisenberg Professor, University of Regensburg, Germany (2013)
• Privatdozent, University of Regensburg, Germany, (since 2018)