Matilda Backholm is an Assistant Professor in Soft Matter Physics at the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University, Finland. Her Living Matter research team develops new experimental and analytical tools to probe forces and flow in soft, living, and fluid materials. The current research focus of the group is to probe the dynamics of mesoscale organisms, organs, and materials. Prof. Backholm received her PhD in Physics (2015) from McMaster University in Canada, MSc in Nanoscience (2011) from Aarhus University in Denmark, and BSc in Physics (2009) from the University of Helsinki in Finland. She did her postdoctoral wok as an Academy of Finland postdoc in the Soft Matter and Wetting group of Prof. Ras at Aalto University.
During her PhD, Prof. Backholm developed a novel and highly sensitive micropipette force sensor to directly measure the viscoelastic material properties (PNAS 2013, EPJE 2015), microswimming (PRE 2014, Phys. Fluids 2014 & 2015) and crawling (Biophys. J. 2014) dynamics, as well as tangling interactions (PRL 2015) of the small nematode C. elegans – an important model organism in biology. Her quantitative, force-based studies transformed our understanding of how this worm moves and adapts to environmental changes. During her Academy of Finland postdoc, she further developed the micropipette technique (Nature Protocols 2019) to directly measure the miniscule friction of drops moving on superhydrophobic surfaces (Commun. Mater. 2020, Adv. Mater. 2021, Nat. Mater. 2023, Nat. Chem. 2024, PNAS 2024). Prof. Backholm has also worked on capillary phenomena (Soft Matter 2014, Langmuir 2017, Adv. Sci. 2020, Science Advances 2020), as well as experimental and computational surface science (Nanotechnology 2012, Appl. Surf. Sci. 2013).
Prof. Backholm is a co-editor for EPL and alumni of the Young Academy Finland. She is a coauthor of 28 scientific peer-reviewed publications in journals and has been invited to give tens of seminars at internationally established conferences and universities. Prof. Backholm is an ERC StG laureate (2023) and a Research Council of Finland Research Fellow (2023), and her current research is also funded by the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation (2023) as well as the Väisälä project grant by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (2023).