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Research

My research concerns multiphysics and multiscale transport phenomena in engineering and biological systems. I’m particularly interested in porous media and the relationship between their structures and the transport properties of fluids, solutes, and energy through them. I develop theoretical and modeling tools borrowed from physics and engineering, and apply it to real world systems, in collaboration with experimentalists.

Some of the scientific questions I’m currently working on are:

• How does the intracellular organization of a cell affect the transport of dilute proteins in the cytoplasm? We developed a multiscale model of particle diffusion in a porous media to understand how proteins such as actin monomers are affected by the intracellular structures. To test and refine our model, we collaborate with experimental biophysicists at Institut Jacques Monod in Paris. 

• How to predict the heterogeneous microstructure of a porous medium given target macroscopic transport properties? This type of inverse problem is similar to a ‘down-scaling’ approach for which no rigorous methodologies has are lacking. We approach this problem combining machine learning strategies and upscaling methodologies.

• What are the consumption and effective diffusion properties cell aggregates in a bioreactor for tissue engineering?  Bioreactors allow to improve cell and organoid culture conditions by facilitating solute and oxygen transport. We developed a multiscale model of cell aggregate in hydrogel and compared its predictions with experimental concentration measurements in a bioreactor in order to identify the consumption rate of various cell types. This work is in collaboration with process engineers and bioengineers at CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay.

• How does inertial flow affect non-equilibrium heat transfer in heat exchangers for aeronautic applications? In this project in collaboration with Safran Tech, we make use of formal upscaling approaches to develop averaged heat transfer models that can be used to predict the performances of heat exchangers with complicated geometries obtained by additive manufacturing.

As a postdoc, I also worked on the physics of cellular membranes to better understand how proteins shape lipid membranes into functional structures such as organelles, and carrier vesicles, in collaboration with various experimental and modeling teams

Keywords: transport in porous media, fluid mechanics, transport in biological systems, cell biophysics, biomechanics, volume averaging method, tissue engineering