Phd on "modeling the collective dynamics of magnetic microswimmers"

Functieomschrijving

Minimally invasive medical procedures, such as targeted drug delivery, cell therapy, microsurgery and micro-sensing, are extremely challenging because of the small length scales. Miniaturized robotic swimmers are promising candidates for carrying out these procedures and in the long-term hold great potential to treat diseases that are currently incurable. However, experimental attempts to develop them have been unsuccessful due to many unsolved challenges regarding their optimal rheological and mechanical properties, and because of the difficulty to actuate them in relevant in-vivo conditions. The swimming performance of microswimmers is, for example, usually tested in simplified phantom models, whereas their behavior in realistic in-vivo biological conditions and the interaction with their microenvironment is still relatively unexplored.