Prof. Doris Vollmer
Doris Vollmer studied physics at the University of Bielefeld, the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), where she received her master diploma. For her Ph.D. she moved to Basel, Switzerland, where she investigated structural and thermodynamic transitions in microemulsions. In 1995 she joined the group of Manfred Schmidt at the University of Mainz, where she became interested in polyelectrolytes. During her Marie Curie Fellowship at the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh (Great Britain), she expanded her field of activity towards the kinetics of phase transitions in binary mixtures and on network formation in suspensions of liquid crystals and colloids. She received two research fellowships from the German Science Foundation and was awarded the ‘H.-P. Kaufmann Preis’ by the German Society for Fat Science for her contributions to microemulsions.
In 2002 she joined the group of Hans-Jürgen Butt at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP) and became project leader in May 2003. First, she studied problems concerning self-organization and pattern formation and imaged the aggregation dynamics of colloids by laser scanning confocal microscopy. Since 2009 her research has been mainly concerned with fundamental and applied problems in the wetting behavior of structured surfaces, in particular of superhydrophobic, superamphiphobic and slippery surfaces. Her work frequently combines synthesis of model structures, analysis of microscopic and macroscopic features with complementary experimental techniques and modeling by mean-field descriptions to gain a profound understanding of the central concepts of the wetting phenomenon under investigation.
In 2015 she obtained a professorship at the Physics Department of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
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