Research Group Lorenz

What are the fundamental physical principles that govern soft and biological materials? How do surfaces and energy landscapes influence their properties? How can we leverage these principles to design novel sustainable and biomedical materials?

The Lorenz group addresses these questions using a range of methods, including optical tweezers, fluorescence microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, and dynamic light scattering. With these methods, we aim to understand the structures of soft materials and link them to their material properties. Such studies will allow us to design new composite bio-materials. 

In biological contexts, we focus on liquid–liquid phase separation as a design principle. Here, we investigate the structure of phase-separating liquids and self-assembling polymers, as well as the impact of networks and energy on phase-separating liquids.