News
2018
July: We are glad to announce new open positions for exciting student projects, focusing on interfacial phenomena in complex configurations, such as Extreme damping by sloshing, wetting dynamics of salt invasion and propulsion by transient boiling. Interested students should contact me directly at herve.elettro@epfl.ch for more info and a lab visit.
Reproduced from (left) Kwon et al., Applied Physics Letters 103.20 (2013), (right) Shahidzadeh-Bonn et al., Langmuir 24.16 (2008) and (bottom) Dekker et al., arXiv:1712.08271 (2017).
April: Our paper extending the Janssen model of frictional screening in granular materials to the case of non homogeneous compaction has been published in Physical Review Materials and selected as an Editor’s suggestion.
March: The MEGA (MEchanics GAthering) Seminars series kick off has been incredibly successful! Stay tuned for more weekly informal seminars, an initiative for closer collaborations within the local Mechanics community @EPFL.
March: APS March meeting 2018, in Los Angeles, California, is intensely interesting!
February: Our paper on the influence of gravity on drop-on-coilable fibres has been accepted in Mechanics Research Communications for a special issue for Gérard Maugin.
January: Just arrived as a Marie Curie Fellow at EPFL in the group of Professor François Gallaire. We will implement deployable structures in microcanals and build a responsive microfluidic element (175,000€, 2018-2020). Let the fun begin !
2017
December: I am the winner of the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2017 in the micro imaging category (find me at 1:16s in the video below).
July: Our paper on negative stiffness and coiling morphology in drop-on-coilable fibres has been published as Front Cover of Soft Matter.
July: Rubén Montecinos joins our group as a M.Sc. student on graphene-assisted encapsulation, with applications in high-resolution imaging of biological objects.
June: Our former M.Sc. student Oscar Saavedra begins a new project on blood rheology at CBS, Montpellier, France under the supervision of Manouk Abkarian. We wish him all the best !
May: A new collaboration with Andrés Concha (Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Chile) begins, on capillary phenomenon and soft structure mechanics.
March: Intense APS March meeting at New Orleans, Louisiana.
2016
December: I have been awarded the Aguirre-Basualdo prize for best PhD research by the Chancellery of the Universities of Paris.
November: I am a finalist for the outreach prize for excellence in scientific research by Le Monde.
October: Our paper on energy harvesting using capillary condensation in mesoporous thin films has been accepted in ACS Nano.
April: Our paper on solid-liquid composites inspired from spider silk has been published in PNAS, was selected as Editor’s suggestion and covered by various media, among which
Focus article in Science
2015
December: Our paper on theory and 3D simulations of elastocapillary coiling of an elastic rod inside a drop has been published in Journal of Elasticity.
November: I am now a Fondecyt postdoctoral Fellow in Professor Francisco Melo’s group in Santiago de Chile, working on mechanics of monoatomic graphene layers.
October: Our paper on theory and numerical simulations of elastocapillary coiling of a rod inside a disk as a model for spider capture silk has been published in International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics.
September: Interview for a documentary on bio-inspiration in scientific research “Nature=Future!“.
June: Our paper on mechanisms of spider capture silks’ adhesion has been published in The Science of Nature.
2014
July: Our windlass project received an ANR grant (450,000€, 8.7% success rate) for 2014-2018.
April: S. Neukirch, A. Antkowiak, F. Vollrath and I received a PICS/CNRS grant to keep developing our international collaborative project on elastocapillarity in spider silk.
2013
November: Royal Society travel grant between Paris and Oxford (12,000 £).
January: Interview for the popular science program “On n’est pas que des cobayes”.
