Material properties depend on their building blocks, as well as the environment. Human blood will gel when it is not pumped through the veins, while one can only eat a jelly pudding when it is properly cooled.

In my work, I use building blocks with tuneable features from nature (filamentous virus, F-actin, …) and the lab (colloidal platelets) to study their behaviour in and out of equilibrium. I apply experimental techniques like in situ ultra-fast confocal microscopy and Small Angle neutron and X-ray scattering mainly in combination with shear flow to access information on a single particle as well as ensemble level, thus facilitating direct comparison with theory and computer simulations. With this approach, I aim to expand the field of directed material design, for example aligned hydrogels for cell growth, as well as to understand complex problems such as the break up process of blood aggregates in complex flow. To elucidate the interplay between structure and mechanical response for these complex systems it is not only a prerequisite to break the problem down to understandable pieces, as physicists like me do, but also to build up complexity in a multidisciplinary scientific surrounding.