João Cabral

João Cabral obtained his first degree in Physics Engineering (IST Lisbon), followed by a stay at the Laboratoire Léon Brillouin (Saclay) with J. Teixeira and MC Bellissent-Funel, and PhD (2002) in polymer thermodynamics at Imperial College London with J. S. Higgins. After a postdoc at NIST (2002-5) in Maryland, USA, with J. F. Douglas, A Karim, and S Hudson, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial, becoming full professor in 2018, enjoying sabbaticals at Fudan (Shanghai) and University of Chicago.

 Our PSCM partnership explored the coupling of microfluidics and SANS for the study of complex fluids. We developed microdevice formulators to navigate across the multi-component phase space and flow-processing ‘chips’ to interrogate complex fluids under complex flows. With L Porcar’s magic, we used beamsizes down to 50 microns, enabling us to spatio-temporally map out-of-equilibrium processes in a way that exceeded our expectations. The partnership unlocked several academic collaborations and industrial funding, and resulted in a number of cover articles.

Photo: Serge Claisse