Plenary Speakers

Prof. Rossana Pasquino

Rossana Pasquino (class 1982) is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical, Materials and Industrial Production Engineering (DICMaPI) at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. She earned her Ph.D. in 2008 from Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II through a joint project between her home university and KU Leuven in Belgium. Following her doctoral studies, she spent a year as a Postdoc working between Belgium and Italy. She was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship in the Initial Training Network Dynacop which led her to move to FORTH in Heraklion, Greece. Additionally, she has been visiting professors at ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2015 and at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada in 2018.

Rossana Pasquino is renowned for her research in the rheology and scattering of complex fluids, with particular emphasis on using rheology as a tool to investigate morphology and microstructural properties. Her work encompasses various aspects of soft matter, including surfactant solutions, gels, polymers, and suspensions. She has authored roughly 90 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and she has a strong collaboration with industrial partners, including food companies and home care industries, to formulate and design products. 

Since 2019 she has served as a Senior Associate Editor for Physics of Fluids, and since 2018 she has been a member of the Editorial Board of Soft Matter. Previously, she also served as an Editor for AIP Advances. She has played a significant role in the organization of major conferences and has delivered keynote lectures at numerous international conferences. 

In recognition of her contributions, she received the Distinguished Young Rheologist Award from TA Instruments in 2018. She has been recently elected as Member at Large for the Society of Rheology (Executive Committee 2026-2028).

Prof. Leonard Sagis

Leonard Sagis obtained an MSc in Chemical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology in 1990, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1994. In 1998, after postdoc positions at the physical chemistry department of Leiden University and the Institute of Technical Chemistry of the University of Amsterdam, he joined Wageningen University, where he is currently a faculty member in the Laboratory of Physics and Physical Chemistry of Food.

From 2011 until 2017 he was also a visiting scientist in the Polymer Physics Group of the Department of Materials, at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. His research interests are in the field of Soft Interface Dominated Materials, such as emulsions, foams, or multiphase hydrogels, more specifically in the relation between the microstructure of these systems, and their properties and stability. His current focus is on the nonlinear dynamic behavior of oil-water and air-water interfaces stabilized by proteins and particles.  

He uses a multidisciplinary multiscale approach to study these systems, which combines experimental methods (bulk and surface rheology, scattering techniques, microscopy), computational methods (MC, NEMD simulations), and theoretical methods (nonequilibrium thermodynamics).

Prof. Alessio Zaccone

Alessio Zaccone received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Chemical and Bioengineering within the Department of Chemistry of ETH Zurich in 2010.

Afterwards he was a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow and an Oppenheimer Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. After serving  as a W2 Professor of Physics at Technical University Munich and as a University Lecturer of Chemical Engineering at University of Cambridge, he has been an associate professor, and, since 2022, a full professor and chair in the Department of Physics at the University of Milano. Awards include the ETH Silver Medal, the 2020 Gauss Professorship of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Fellowship of Queens' College Cambridge, the 2017 Influential Researcher award of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, the IoP Journal of Physics Emerging Leader award, and an ERC Consolidator grant "Multimech".

He is the author of the monograph "Theory of Disordered Solids" (Springer, Cham, 2023). His research interests include amorphous solids, rheology of complex fluids, superconductivity, statistical physics, quantum dissipative systems, and relativistic fluids. His research group's activities are focusing on developing a novel time-scale bridging methodology for the mechanics and rehology of polymers.