Soft Materials Modelling

Professor:

Maria Sammalkorpi, D.Sc. (Tech.)

Maria claims to be nice, and occasionally is. She used to be quite shy about her geeky books and computers. Then, she went to get a degree in physics and grew up a little. The amount she grew is rather disputable as she still measures only 153cm (~5ft). Sometime later she acknowledged also chemistry, got a doctoral degree, and fell in love, definitely not in that order.

Research Fellow:

Dmitry Tolmachev, Ph.D.

Dmitry models biosynthetic protein materials, but is also involved with the cellulose modelling directions of the group. Dmitry has a broad molecular modelling background of chemically specific molecular systems.

Post-docs:

Ygor Morais Jaques, Ph.D.

Ygor's research area is molecular level wetting of surfaces. He focuses on droplet spreading on interfaces of varying hydrophobicity. Ygor uses mainly atomistic detail approaches and considers chemically specific interfaces and molecular systems.

Max Philipp Holl, Ph.D.

Max focuses in the group on theory and modelling approaches to magnetic field driven pattern formation in systems with diffuse interfaces. His methodological expertise is in field-theoretic models and statistical mechanics, and he comes to the group with soft matter physics background.

Tuuva Kastinen, Ph.D.

Tuuva works on polypeptide and other polyelectrolyte interactions in aqueous solutions. She uses atomistic detail molecular dynamics (MD) and ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) approaches in her work. Tuuva's background is in chemistry and she has a quantum chemistry modelling background.

Alberto Scacchi, Ph.D.

Alberto is part of the LIBER CoE Biomolecular Materials group and somewhat affiliated with also the LIBER CoE Active Matter group, but enough Soft Matter Modeller to get a listing also here. Alberto models ferrofluids and structure formation in complex protein solutions but also colloidal systems and block-copolymer assemblies. He uses classical density functional theory and coarse-grained mesoscale models to study self-assembly and organization of soft matter. Alberto's background is soft matter physics and he is very familiar with statistical mechanics approaches and basic theory in addition to numerical approaches.

Graduate students:

Maisa Vuorte, M.Sc.

Maisa works on characterizing surfactant adsorption from apolar solvents to solid substrates computationally in the group. She has also worked on polymeric micelles and dielectric membranes. Maisa comes to us with a bioinformation technology and Life Science Technologies Aalto M.Sc. program, augmented with some molecular biosciences studies, background.

Zhennan Kou, M.Sc.

Zhennan models the interactions of cellulose crystals in water solutions focusing especially on the effects of cosolutes. Before joining the group, Zhennan did his M.Sc. thesis in the Applied Physics Department of Aalto University focusing on modelling phonons in MoS2 lattices.

Kourosh Hasheminejad, M.Sc.

Kourosh works on modelling polymer film coatings on biobased substrates. He uses mesoscale dissipative particle dynamics and atomistic detail molecular dynamics methodology to examine block-copolymer assembly in bulk and the film formation and structure at the substrate. Kourosh' comes to the group with a materials science background.

Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi, M. Sc.

Hossein works on interactions of charged polymers and salt ions. He uses atomistic, coarse-grained and mean field theory based approaches to examine interactions rising in polyelectrolyte systems in the presence of excess salt. Hossein's background is physics.

Adam Harmat, M. Sc.

Adam works on multiscale modelling of biomolecular condensates, especially the effect of external fields on liquid-liquid phase separation in protein systems. Adam comes to the group with chemical engineering and physical chemistry study background.

Master's thesis students:

Aapo Lokka

Aapo is doing his M.Sc. thesis on modelling surfactant assemblies in apolar solvents in electric fields. His work targets understanding of reverse micelles as charge carriers and the tunability of colloidal assembly via electric fields in apolar media.

Miko Niemistö

Miko is doing his M.Sc. thesis on the effects of silane coatings on wetting of silica interfaces. Previously, Miko has worked in the group on protein modelling targeted at understanding biomolecular condensates formation.

Undergraduate students (research assistants):

Emil Stråka

Emil's research in the group focuses on magnetically controlled assembly of nanoparticles via Brownian and Langevin dynamics simulations approaches. 

Group alumni:

Dr. Maisa Vuorte, Dr. Mohammad Khavani Sariani, Dr. Sousa Javan Nikkhah, Dr. Sathish Kumar Mudedla, Dr. Piotr Batys, Dr. Ran Zhang, Dr. Erol Yildirm, Dr. Hanne Antila, L.Sc. Dipti Potdar, M.Sc. Zahra Mohammadyarloo, M.Sc. Jukka Määttä, M.Sc. Samu Kivistö, M.Sc. Anna Leino, M.Sc. Dominik Wowczyk, Markus Kyllönen, Rosa Penttinen,Juliaana Juurakko, Iina Kivimäki, Laura Tiittanen, Marc Härkönen, Sami Kulju, Sohvi Luukkonen