ESPCI web site
Her work entitled ‘Megakaryocytes, capsules and swimming drops under confinement’ describes her research activities (summarised opposite), teaching and involvement in the ESPCI community.
Microfluidics offers new ways of constraining microscopic objects and deforming them using hydrodynamic flows. In recent years, her research has involved using simple microfluidic devices to answer questions in physics, physical chemistry or biology. The objects studied have been varied, but all involve soft interfacial matter, whether in the biological membranes of megakaryocytes, the polymer membranes of capsules or swimming drops that propel themselves only thanks to interfacial constraints. What all these objects have in common is that they have been subjected to varying degrees of confinement: the megakaryocytes attached to the micropillars are subjected to elongation and shear forces that lead to deformation of their cytoplasm and to the production of blood platelets in vitro under flow; the polymer capsules are deformed through constrictions in order to probe the mechanical properties of their membrane; as for the swimming drops In the first of these three systems, a remarkable behaviour has been demonstrated at high confinement, consisting of spontaneous fragmentation of the most confined drops. In these three systems, the geometric confinement of the objects on a microscopic scale has made it possible to probe the matter, via reversible deformations (in the case of capsules) or irreversible deformations (in the case of megakaryocytes or swimming drops). In the future, Mathilde proposes to continue probing swimming drops via external perturbations and to start a new research project on synthetic bio-condensates in microfluidics.