Wiebke Drenckhan, born 6 April 1977 in

Bad Belzig Bad Belzig (), until 2010 Belzig, is a historic town in Brandenburg, Germany located about southwest of Berlin. It is the capital of the Potsdam-Mittelmark district. Geography Bad Belzig is located within the Fläming hill range and in the cen ...

, is a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

. She is a

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

research director at the Institut Charles Sadron, where she investigates the physics and physical chemistry of liquid and solid

foam Foams are two-phase materials science, material systems where a gas is dispersed in a second, non-gaseous material, specifically, in which gas cells are enclosed by a distinct liquid or solid material. Note, this source focuses only on liquid ...

s and

emulsion An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally Miscibility, immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloi ...

s. She also works as illustrator for scientific journals and popular science books and she collaborates regularly with artists and designers.

Biography

After studying physics and mathematics in Germany (

University of Rostock The University of Rostock () is a public university located in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. Founded in 1419, it is the third-oldest university in Germany. It is the oldest university in continental northern Europe and the Baltic Se ...

Humboldt University Berlin The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany. The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt ...

) and New Zealand (

University of Canterbury The University of Canterbury (UC; ; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was founded in 1873 as Canterbur ...

) she joins

Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Unive ...

for her PhD thesis under the supervision of Denis Weaire. In the following, she receives an EMBARK Fellowship from the Irish Research Council, before being invited on a 1-year research stay by the city of Paris to work at the University Paris-Diderot. In 2007, she is hired by the

and joins Dominique Langevin’s research group at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides at

Paris-Sud University Paris-Sud University (), also known as the University of Paris — XI (or as the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, University of Paris before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, ...

. In 2014 she obtains her Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches on the topic “A science of transition – from liquid to solid foams”. In 2016, she moves her research activities to the Institut Charles Sadron at the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. Founded in the 16th century by Johannes Sturm, it was a center of intellectual life during ...

Research

Wiebke Drenckhan works on the physics and physical chemistry of liquid and solid foams and emulsions. Linking fundamental and applied research, she combines experiments and computer simulations to advance our understanding of the generation, stability and structure of liquid foams and emulsions. She uses this understanding to propose new approaches for the generation of solid polymer foams with controlled structural properties in a “liquid templating” approach, with the goal to understand and control their structure-property relations. Of particular interest to her work is the development of interfacial mechanisms to modify in a controlled manner how bubbles and drops interact in foams and emulsions in order to create self-assembled polymeric

metamaterial A metamaterial (from the Greek word μετά ''meta'', meaning "beyond" or "after", and the Latin word ''materia'', meaning "matter" or "material") is a type of material engineered to have a property, typically rarely observed in naturally occu ...

Awards

* 2012 ERC Starting Grant * 2013

Irène Joliot-Curie Prize The Irène Joliot-Curie Prize is a French prize for women in science and technology, founded in 2001. It is awarded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, the Airbus, Airbus Group corporate foundation, the French Academy of ...

for “Young French Female Scientist of the Year” * 2013 Henkel Laundry & Home Care Research Award * 2015 CNRS Bronze Medal * 2019 ERC Consolidator grant

Outreach

Wiebke Drenckhan is actively involved in different scientific outreach activities. She collaborates regularly with artists and designers. She also works as cartoonist and illustrator for scientific journals and popular science books. She provided for many years physics cartoons for the German

Physik Journal ' is the official journal of the . Before 2002 it was named '. History The ' was founded in 1943 by , who was also the editor from 1944 to 1972. At the start, it was issued by the . Starting in 1946, it became an official publication of the ...

and illustrated the “Physics in Daily life” Column by Jo Hermans in Europhysics News.

References

External links

Wiebke Drenckhan – Portrait de Femmes en Physique (in French)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Drenckhan, Wiebke 21st-century German physicists 21st-century German women scientists German women physicists Living people 1977 births Research directors of the French National Centre for Scientific Research