After completing a postdoctoral stay in the group of Prof. E. W. (Bert) Meijer, Kripa has returned as a postdoctoral researcher since one month and will be with us until the end of October, based in office 104. Welcome back !

We said goodbye one week ago to Kainã Gonçalves Diniz, postdoctoral researcher in our group. He went back to Brasil where he obtained a position of assistant professor in the Optical Tweezers Group at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Congratulations again and all the best for the future !

Since nearly two weeks, we have the pleasure to welcome a new post-doctoral researcher in our team, Dimitry Boriskovsky. He received both his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Physics from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His Master’s research, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Doron Cohen, focused on
theoretical modeling, where he developed minimal models exhibiting negative mobility and sliding-transition phenomena. He completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Yael Roichman. His doctoral work centered on experimental soft and active matter physics, including optical trapping and manipulation of colloidal suspensions, the synthesis of active Janus particles, and studies of macroscopic systems of self-propelled robot swarms. Through the latter, we explored
thermodynamic analogies that extend to inherently athermal, non-equilibrium environments.
In his postdoctoral research, he is excited to investigate the stochastic thermodynamics of nano- and microscale systems, with a particular interest in modern nonequilibrium thermodynamic theorems and relations.

Welcome Dima !

Our latest postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Tara Clayton, arrived a week ago, between a week-end and a holiday. Tara comes from Montana, USA, and got her Bachelor’s in Chemistry at Reed College. She then went on to get her PhD in chemistry from the University of Oregon under the supervision of Professor Ramesh Jasti. She focused on the synthesis of highly strained aromatic macrocycles known as cycloparaphenylenes, CPPs, or carbon nanohoops. She developed synthetic methods aimed at late-stage transformations of CPPs decorated with versatile functional groups, affording efficient synthesis of a variety of CPP derivatives. She explored the reactivity of fluorinated and alkyne-containing CPPs to make novel extended structures including metalated CPPs, redox-active CPPs, novel guest-host CPP-fullerene complexes, and trimeric CPPs. She defended in March 2025 and will now start to explore the vibrational strong coupling. Welcome Tara !