2019 VISITING SCIENTISTS

Sami Boufi is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Sfax (Tunisia) and develops his research activity in the field of biomass valorisation with a focus on nanocelluloses, their production, characterisation and use. He comes to Grenoble to work with Albert Magnin from the LRP and Julien Bras from the LGP2 on the production of high-consistency cellulose nanofibrils via twin screw extrusion. The aim is to be able to obtain highly concentrated suspensions of nanocelluloses without any concentration step required, therefore reducing the production costs, a key challenge in the industrial production of nanocellulose.

Dr. Madhav Ranganathan is associate professor at the Department of Chemistry of the IIT Kampur (India). He works on statistical and non-linear physics, crystal growth, biophysics and cellular motion, and comes to Grenoble to collaborate with Chaouqi Misbah from the LIPhy and Marc Leonetti from the LRP on the development of a computational model for the 3D simulation of the amoeboid swimming of cells. Besides the numerical developments, experimental investigations will be carried out to elucidate the importance of the cellular fluidity and the viscosity of the cell membrane on the mechanics of the motion.