Carla Fernandez Rico

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I am a material scientist born in Barcelona, who is currently working as Postdoctoral Researcher at Department of Materials at ETH Zurich in the Complex Materials’ Group. My main research interest lies in the broad field of soft ‘squishy’ matter, particularly in topics related to self-assembly and phase separation processes for making functional and environmentally friendly materials.

Soft Matter: Colloids, liquid crystals and more!

The pictures you see above are microscopy images of colloidal rods and colloidal bananas. Colloidal particles are particles with sizes ranging from few nanometres to few micrometers that are typically suspended in a solvent, like fat particles in milk. I developed these two systems during my doctoral research at the University of Oxford to study how particle curvature influences the way they self-organise into complex phases, such as liquid crystals. This helped us understand which are the minimal shape requirements that microscopic building blocks should have to form specific liquid crystal phases.

During my first Postdoctoral research in the Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials, I moved from colloids to macromolecules, and developed techniques to shape the microstructure of polymer networks into interconnected channel-like structures that are useful for mechanical and optical applications. Very recently, I started my second postdoc in the Complex Group, where I am learning how use living organisms, such as bacteria, to actually make functional materials for you!

If you want to learn more details about my research go to the Publications tab or on my twitter feed.

Latest News

06/11/2023. Carla’s Postdoctoral work on Elastic Phase Separation and Bicontinuous Structures was published last week in Nature Materials! Congratulations to all the co-authors for achieving such an amazing milestone!

10/10/2023. Carla has been recently selected as one of the 2023 Rising Stars of Biological and Soft Matter by the University of Chicago and UCSD, and she will present her work on MicroElastic Phase Separation next Friday 13/10/2023. Register for the symposium using this link!

26/09/2023. At the end of September, Carla won the Woman in Interactive Materials Award (WIMA) award, organized by DWI Leibniz Institute. The competition was fierce, and the event was a fantastic day of science!