PMC is one of 22 laboratories located at the Ecole polytechnique research centre working on the frontier of knowledge on the major interdisciplinary scientific, technological and societal issues.
Within the Teaching and Research Department of Ecole polytechnique, PMC (Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée) is a mixed research unit (Ecole polytechnique/CNRS) whose work is organized around two fundamental topics that are the nanosciences and the physics of Irregularity.
We try to understand the solid, liquid or intermediate states (gel, pastes, foams…)of matter (structure, properties, phenomena of sets related to the interactions between the particles that compose it), the condensed matter physics is a science that is upstream of innumerable technological advances.

A full-time PhD position is open at the Chemistry Group of PMC lab at Ecole Polytechnique. The position is funded by the french National Research Agency (ANR). The annual salary bases on the table of CNRS.

The 1st goal is to develop a micro-tomographic shearmetry that allows 3D-mapping and monitoring of the time-dependent shear stress profile with a sub-micron spatial resolution and a temporal resolution at the milliseconds scale. This constitutes a breakthrough from the conventional approaches based on particle tracking within microfluidic chambers. We propose to develop a highly novel shearmetry technique through a radically different methodology.
The 2nd goal is to use the new shearmetry technique to investigate a number of important mechanobiological questions in endothelial cells (ECs) lining the inner surfaces of blood vessels. Computational simulations suggest that the shear-induced wavy nature of the EC surface leads to significant subcellular variations[1,2]. This prediction will be experimentally examined focusing on their impact on the flow-induced intracellular calcium mobilization and endothelial wound healing processes.
A successful pursuit of this project will provide the new shearmetry platform as a universal experimental solution to measure, monitor, and analyze the dynamic shear stress distribution in a wide range of micro- and bio-fluidic systems and environments.

[1] Barbee et al, Subcellular distribution of shear stress at the surface of flow-aligned and nonaligned endothelial... Am J Physiol. 268, 4, H1765 (1995)
[2] Hogan et al, Shear stress in the microvasculature: ... and endothelial wall undulation. Biomech. Model. Mechanobiol. 18, 4, 1095-1109 (2019)