DIFFER Seminar: From Soft Matter to Functional Materials

Abstract: Advanced functional materials are at the core of chemistry and engineering research to address societal challenges related to health, energy, and sustainability. One common feature of many functional materials is that they are structured over multiple length scales by exploiting intermediate soft matter states during their assembly to realize hierarchical ordering. This is on account that functional properties (mechanical, mass and energy transport, catalytic, optical, and others) can be optimized for specific applications by tuning the materials multiscale composition and morphology. While in the past the focus was mainly on the functionality of materials, future solutions need to be sustainable, e.g., by using resources that are abundant, biocompatible and/or renewable such as carbon- and silica-based building blocks. To realize materials with optimized and/or new functionalities that are made from sustainable building blocks, being able to rationally organize building blocks over multiple length scales within a well-defined structural hierarchy will be of utmost importance. In this lecture I will discuss, from a soft matter perspective, my research into multiscale assembly of functional materials. To this end, the importance of quantitative (in-situ & 3D) microscopy will also be highlighted, to gain fundamental insights into process dynamics, materials morphology, and functional properties.

Biography: Heiner Friedrich is a physical chemist with a passion for assembling complex functional structures using soft matter principles. He received his master’s degree in physics in 2001 from TU Dresden (GER) with a specialization in particle and wave optics. From 2002 to 2005 he worked at Arizona State University (USA) developing electron tomography for materials science. He then moved to Utrecht University (NL) where in 2009 he obtained his PhD (cum laude) in the fields of inorganic chemistry, catalysis, and quantitative electron microscopy.

In 2009 he started part-time as a junior assistant professor at Utrecht University and as a postdoctoral researcher at TU Eindhoven, where he was appointed as full-time assistant professor in 2011. He has been leading since 2018 the Center for Multiscale Electron Microscopy and since 2019 he has been working as a scientific staff member at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry. He acts as the TU/e executive board member of the Dutch Electron Microscopy Infrastructure (NEMI). His research focusses on the fundamental aspects of chemical and physical processes relevant to the multiscale structuring of materials combining bottom-up and top-down assembly methods.