We are pleased to announce the attendance of the following keynote speakers:

 

Prof. Dr. Abbas Firoozabadi

 

The research interests of Prof. Dr. Abbas Firoozabadi relate to the efficient production of energy from subsurface conventional/unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs and renewable energy production from geothermal formations and stewardship of the environment.  Thermodynamics from classical bulk fluids and solids, fluid-fluid and fluid-solid interfaces, to molecular and atomistic simulations provide the guiding principles for most of his research work. Professor Firoozabadi and his coworkers were among the first to measure and formulate thermal diffusion in three and higher-component mixtures. In the last twenty years, Prof. Firoozabadi has taught Thermodynamics at Yale University, Peking University, Tokyo University, and at Rice University. He has been a Distinguished Research Professor at Rice University since 2019. Professor Firoozabadi has authored two books on Thermodynamics and has authored/coauthored some 265 Journal papers. His google H score is 82 and his publications have received more than 21,000 citations.  He has received four major awards of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) including the Anthony Lucas Gold Medal. He was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2012. Among the concepts he has introduced include: gas-wetting, water-oil interfacial elasticity increase, speed up of molecular simulations of hydrate formation based on phase stability, and CO₂ viscosification by oligomers to broaden the use of CO₂.  He has also advanced reservoir simulation based on higher-order methods. He has 3 patents. Professor Firoozabadi has a BS degree from the Abadan Institute of Technology, Abadan, Iran, MS and PhD degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Il. ring. He did post-doctoral work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Chemical Engineering Department. 

 

Prof. Dr. Werner Köhler

Prof. Dr. Werner Köhler is a Professor of Experimental Physics at Universität Bayreuth, Physikalisches Institut, Germany since 1998. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Physics at Universität Bayreuth in 1984 and 1988, respectively. During the following two years, he worked as a post-doc in the Molecular and Optical Electronics Laboratory at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. He continued his research work by becoming a project leader for polymer analysis at the Max-Plank Institute for Polymer Research in Maiz, Germany till 1998. During this period he studied, as well, the habilitation in Physical Chemistry at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz. His work career includes different areas of research, such as transport processes and dynamics of soft matter, polymer physics, structure formation, criticality, and spinodal decomposition, diffusion in multicomponent fluids, thermodiffusion, Soret effect, light scattering, holography, interferometry, microscopy, microfluidics and microgravity experiments. 

 

Prof. Dr. Valentina Shevtsova 

Prof. Dr. Valentina Shevtsova is a Research Professor at the Basque Science Foundation attached to Mondragon University, Arrasate, Spain since 2020.  Her career has matured and developed in the Microgravity Research Centre of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, where she worked as a Sr. scientist and head of the research group for over twenty years.  Her research has included theoretical studies, computational simulations and experiments, in particular, on processes associated with mass transport in fluids in microgravity as well as with fluid surface dynamics.  She was the coordinator of five space experiments on the International Space Station (ISS): IVIDIL, DCMIX2 and DCMIX4, VIPIL and JEREMI. Her research team performed experiments in eight parabolic flight campaigns with outstanding results, published in the best physical journals. Her work has produced over 220 refereed papers and her citation counts are more than 4950. She was a coordinator of two ESA Topical Teams:  “Diffusion in non-metallic liquid” related to the DCMIX project and “Marangoni instabilities in systems with cylindrical symmetry” related to JEREMI. A proposal for a new Topical Team “Marangoni phenomena and applications” are currently under evaluation by ESA.  Two recent proposals for the experiments on the sounding rocket submitted in response to 2022 ESA call were evaluated as excellent.  She will lead the work suggested in these proposals: “Transport in CO2 mixtures near the critical point (TransCO2) and “Microparticle Adsorption by Viscoelastic Fluid Under Periodic Excitations (MAVFLU)”.  

 

Prof. Dr. Alberto Vailati

 

Prof. Dr. Alberto Vailati is full professor in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the Dipartimento di Fisica "Aldo Pontremoli", Università degli Studi di Milano. His research is focused on the experimental investigation of fluctuations and pattern formation in complex systems. Research topics include non-equilibrium fluctuations during diffusion processes in microgravity, hydrodynamic instabilities in complex fluids, heat transfer with smart nanofluids, hydrodynamic instabilities of liquid jets, biomechanics and bio-fluidmechanics.  He has a wide expertise in the development of advanced optical diagnostic techniques suited for the investigation of liquids in Space. In collaboration with UCSB he has developed the dynamic shadowgraphy diagnostics employed during the GRADFLEX microgravity experiment of the European Space Agency (ESA) aboard FOTON M3. He is co-inventor the Near Field Scattering technique, selected by ESA for the SODI-COLLOID facility aboard the International Space Station.  He is the international coordinator of the “Giant Fluctuations” and “TechNES” projects of ESA, aimed at the investigation of diffusive mass transfer at the mesoscopic scale under microgravity conditions, and at the development of innovative methods for the investigation of systems under non-equilibrium conditions. He is member of the NESTEX project of ESA-CMSA, aimed at the investigation of colloidal suspensions on the International Space Station and Chinese Space Station. He is co-proponent of the “Sedimenting Colloids” project of ESA, which will use the FLUMIAS microscopy facility to investigate mesoscopic fluctuations occurring  when gravity is applied/removed from a suspension of colloidal particles.