Physicochemical engineering at interfaces

Interfacial sciences · Biomaterials · Data science

My name is Henri-Louis Girard, and I am performing research on interactions at solid-liquid and liquid-liquid interfaces in the pursuit of my Ph.D. at MIT in the group of Pr. Kripa Varanasi.

My work explores a range of interactions at interfaces across scales, from adsorption of molecules on substrates to the adhesion of ice on solids with a focus on tailoring the physico-chemical properties of surfaces (microstructure, roughness, chemical functionalization, and charge) to achieve the desired behavior.

In particular, I investigated ways to restrict transport phenomena between an impinging drop and a surface, the use of in situ templating to increase protein nucleation rates, the use of lubricated surfaces to mitigate the adsorption of asphaltenes, and the use of hybrid surfaces to reduce the adhesion force of ice on solids.

The vast amount data necessary to obtain statistically significant results has led me to develop custom hardware and software solutions to automate the experimental process and data gathering. I also leveraged image segmentation and machine learning approaches to process the data (projects available on Github) and extract interesting trends in the results.