Plenary Speakers

Anh V. Nguyen is a full professor in the School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He obtained his BE and PhD degrees in Czechoslovakia and then worked under an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Max Plank Institute for Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, before migrating to Australia in 1996. His research is concerned with applied colloid and surface chemistry in chemical engineering, in particular, surfactant adsorption, liquid films and surface forces. He published one book on the colloidal science of flotation and more 350 peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters.

Eduardo Guzmán, Associate Professor at the Physico-Chemistry Department and researcher at the Multi-disciplinary Institute in the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), received his MSc in Chemistry and in Science (2004) and Technology of Colloids and Interfaces (2006), and his PhD in Science (2009) at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). After his PhD, he worked for a period of four years (2010-2014) at the Istituto per l’Energetica e le Interfasi in Genoa (Italy), after which he returned to his alma mater (July 2014), where he was appointed as Associate Professor in March 2020. He has published more than 110 papers in JCR journals and 11 chapters in books (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4682-2734), H-index 38, and has co-authored more than 100 contributions to different national and international conferences. His main research interests are LbL assembly, interfacial rheology, drug delivery, biophysics, cosmetics, and pest control. He has been the supervisor of 2 PhD students (nowadays 2 students are carrying out his/her PhD Thesis under his supervision), 14 Master students and 30 undergraduate students. He has been involved in 2 EU and 6 Spanish-funded founded I+D grants and has been scientifically responsible for 5 cooperation projects between academia and industry. He is a member of the editorial board of different scientific journals, including Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, Colloids and Interfaces, Coatings and Polymers.

Dr Wiebke Drenckhan is CNRS research director at the Institut Charles Sadron (Strasbourg, France), where she moved after having worked at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (Orsay, France) for 10 years. She obtained her PhD in 2004 from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, after her studies in physics and mathematics in Germany and New Zealand. Her research activities are positioned at the interface between physics and physical chemistry with the aim to advance our understanding of dispersed systems – such as foams and emulsions – in the liquid or solid state. This concerns in particular their generation, their stability and their structure/property relations. She is also actively involved in science outreach activities. For example, she develops art/science shows with bubble artists and illustrates outreach books.

Dr. habil. Georgi Gochev is a research associate at the Institute of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Krakow, Poland) since 2019. He obtained his MSc in Chemistry in 2002 at the Chemistry Faculty of the Sofia University (Sofia, Bulgaria) and his PhD in Physical Chemistry in 2010 at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia, Bulgaria). After that he worked in the Max-Plank-Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (Potsdam, Germany) during 2010–2017 and in the University of Münster (Münster, Germany) during 2017–2019. His research activities span the scientific domain of soft colloids and are focused on the role of surfactants, polymers and proteins in surface phenomena at soft interfaces, in thin liquid films, and in foams and emulsions. His recent research interest is in protein foams and involves studies on the impact of various physicochemical factors on foam stability analysed at different length scales in the hierarchical chain interface–foam film–foam. He is also keen on the history of Colloid and Interface Science, which lasts for already 4 centuries (doi.org/10.1016/j.cis.2015.08.009).