Joelle Fréchette – Soft landing and sticky contacts

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California Berkeley

Understanding and harnessing adhesive interactions between soft materials provides materials design strategies for coatings, recycling, and biomaterials. This presentation will discuss our efforts to understand how soft materials make contact and adhere under dynamic conditions in fluid environments, or between two soft surfaces. Measurements of interactions between soft surfaces will show how elastic films deform due to viscous forces and influence adhesion. In particular, we will discuss how detachment from soft probes suppresses the interfacial instabilities of a model viscoelastic polymer adhesive. We will then discuss the importance of surface interaction for underwater adhesion, specifically looking at the role of hydrogen bonding.

Short bio. Joelle Frechette received her PhD from Princeton University in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science studying surface forces and adhesion in electrochemical environment. She joined Johns Hopkins University in 2006 and moved to UC Berkeley in 2021. She was awarded the NSF CAREER award, the 3M untenured faculty award, the ONR Young Investigator award, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2017. Her research interests include: adhesion in fluid environments, particles at fluid interfaces, and surface force measurements.