Plenary Speakers and Keynotes
Prof. Philippe Coussot
Gustave Eiffel University/CNRS (France)
"Fifty shades of yield stress fluids: rheological challenges and engineering perspectives"
Philippe Coussot is a senior researcher in the Rheophysics and Porous Media department of Laboratoire Navier (Univ. Gustave Eiffel – CNRS – Ecole des PontsParisTech). After a first career stage on the rheology and hydraulics of mudflows and debris flows, he developed research, in particular with MRI, on the rheology and flow properties under various conditions of pastes and suspensions and, in a next step, on transfers (drying, imbibition, colloid transport) in porous media. He published Mudflow Rheology and Dynamics (Balkema, 1997), Rheometry of pastes, suspensions and granular materials (Wiley, 2005), and Rheophysics (Springer, 2014), and received the Silver Medal from CNRS (2015), the Weissenberg Award from the European Society of Rheology (2017), and the Medal for Porous Media Research from Interpore (2023).
Prof. Evelyne van Ruymbeke
UCLouvain (Belgium)
"Viscoelastic properties of associating polymers: When several dynamics are coming into play"
Since 2012, Prof. Evelyne van Ruymbeke is Research Associate of the FNRS and Professor at UCLouvain (Belgium) working at the Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanosciences, after two years as scientist in the Polymer Rheology and Processing Research department at DSM (Geleen, The Netherlands), and a three years postdoctoral stay with Prof. Dimitris Vlassopoulos at the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (Heraklion, Greece).
The overall objective of her research is to understand and model at the mesoscopic level the relationship between the composition of polymeric samples and their rheological behavior. Her interests include the study of the properties of complex macromolecules, supramolecular polymer networks and gels as well as of polymer networks governed by different dynamics.
In 2011 and in 2018, she received the Journal of Rheology Publication Award of the Society of Rheology, and in 2016, she received the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award of the Society of Rheology.
Prof. Susanne Fielding
Durham University, Department of Physics, United Kingdom
"Memory and yielding of soft materials"
When subject to an imposed deformation or load, many soft materials under go a dynamical yielding transition. Often this is highly delayed after the deformation or load is applied, and shows strong signatures of memory of how the sample was prepared. During the yielding process, strain commonly localises in the form of shear bands or fractures. These may then heal away to leave a uniformly flowing state, or may cause the material to fail catastrophically. This talk will review work developing criteria for the onset of shear banding in the dynamical yielding of soft materials. It will also consider how initially localised microscopic plastic events - the precursors to yielding - first start spatially cooperating to result in macroscopic banding or catastrophic material failure during yielding. Finally, strategies for designing materials with increased failure toughness and/or programmable shape memory will be discussed.
Dr. Safa Jamali
Northeastern University (USA)
"Rheoinformatics: Data-driven unification of experimental, computational, and theoretical rheology"
Safa is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, in Boston, USA where he has been since 2017. Prior to joining Northeastern, he received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University’s Macromolecular Science department, followed by a period of postdoctoral training at MIT’s Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Energy Initiative. His research group’s activities are currently focused on developing and using a series of data-driven and computational techniques to study physics and rheology of complex fluids. Science-based data-driven methods and machine-learning platforms for rheological applications have been a major thrust of his efforts in recent years, in addition to using computational and network analytic tools to better understand the physics of particulate systems.