2020 VISITING SCIENTISTS

Georgy Ganchenko is a researcher at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation in Krasnodar. He works in the Laboratory of Micro- and Nanoscale Electro- and hydrodynamics and will be visiting researchers from the LRP in Grenoble for a two months stay in 2020 as part of a project dealing with the electrokinetics of viscoelastic fluids under electric fields. During his stay, he will carry out some experimentations on microfluidic set ups to compare the experimental results to theoretical assumptions and verify the relevancy of the existing mathematical models of electroosmosis and electrophoresis. The aim of this stay is to draw the lines of a further collaboration that would bring together experimental and theoretical investigations on the behaviour of complex fluids associated to electric fields.

Eric Oscar Amonsou is associate professor in the Department of Biotechnology and Food Technology of the Durban University of Technology (South Africa), he is also the founder and the CEO of the non-profit company Nutrifid based in Durban. His research interests relate to plant, food and nutrition sciences and technologies, in particular the chemistry of plant proteins and polysaccharides, their characterisation and their modification, for the development of new functional properties having applications in packaging or nutrition. He will visit researchers from le LGP2 to work on the improvement of starch nanocrystals production processes, using modern food processing techniques coupled with enzymatic treatments. The aim is to produce starch nanocrystals with a better preserved molecular structure that would fit the requirements of applications such as the production of flexible bioplastics or composites for food packaging, or the dispersion for food coating.

Roger Lentle is a Professor of digestive biomechanics at the Medical and Physiology Research Unit of the Massey University in New-Zealand. He will come to Grenoble to work with researchers from the LRP on the transport of particles at small-scales by the active intestinal mucosa. Roger Lentle has a strong expertise in the use of in vivo and ex-vivo preparations to characterize and quantify contractile movements in the walls of various organs, notably the components of the gut, the bladder and the uterus. The aim of this visit is to develop an experimental set-up in order to describe and quantify the transport of microparticles near the intestinal mucosa using experiments that couple advanced techniques of physiology and microfluidics. The results should open the way to the development of new tools to characterise the propensity of drug delivery systems (e.g. microcapsules) to adhere to mucosa and reach specific sites.