Dirk Aarts

Dirk Aarts studied chemistry at the University of Utrecht, and completed his PhD in 2005 at the Van ’t Hoff Laboratory for Physical and Colloidal Chemistry under the supervision of Prof Henk Lekkerkerker. He subsequently moved to the Ecole Normale Supérieure as a Marie Curie Fellow, joining the group of Prof. Daniel Bonn. In 2007 he took up a lecturership at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford, combined with a Studentship at Christ Church. He was made full professor in 2013.

The Aarts lab studies the rich range of behaviours on the micrometer scale, where entropy and fluctuations dominate, in living and non-living systems. By combining microscopy, microfluidics, and colloid science, together with statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics models, we study complex fluids and develop biotechnology platforms.