Martien Cohen Stuart talks to Alexandra Haywood about soft matter, music and fruit trees

              

Martien Cohen Stuart is professor and chair of physical chemistry and colloid science at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and is the new chair of the Soft Matter editorial board. He has received numerous awards, including the Akzo Nobel Science Award in 2008. Martien has a broad range of research interests in the field of soft condensed matter, including surfactants, emulsions, self-assembly, interfaces, wetting and the physics of macromolecules in living cells.

 

Welcome to the Soft Matter editorial board. What excites you most about your new role?

Two things, one is that I get a look behind the scenes at what's going on in publishing and what's going on in soft matter which I find interesting. The other thing is that I get to meet many people in the area that play a role in this field of science.

Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?

I think it happened relatively late in my life. I was a curious person with an interest in biology as a school kid but there was not a clear sign I would become a scientist.  Then I studied chemistry as a student. When I graduated the economic situation was rather bad and it was not easy to get a normal job so I decided then to go for a PhD.  I joined the university, where I am now, to do a PhD just to see what it was like. It happened to be a very good place which was really inspiring - I had very interesting and very clever fellow PhD students who I learnt a lot from.  The staff in the lab were excellent and so I got a taste for it and that's where it really started.

How would you define soft matter and what motivated you to work in this field?

What I see as soft matter is the collective behaviour of molecules and particles. So not just one single particle but the way that they interact together, the structures they form and the way they organise. The role of the forces and energies controlling such systems that bring out the structure and the function is also part of this field.  It is also very important to understand why these structures form. So those two aspects I think are key to soft matter, not just to know how, but to know why. That's where the science is.

What projects are you working on at the moment?

I've got a big group with a broad spectrum of activities but the important theme is self assembly driven by electrostatic attraction - how charge particles come together to form objects. Another theme is self assembling gels, some of them based on synthetic polymers but also some of them based on biosynthetic polymers. For example, proteins that are not natural but are designed, coded in DNA and then produced by cells. I think that's a very fascinating area.

What's going to be next big thing in your field?

That's hard to say.  I think from the view point of the needs for society, soft matter has got a lot to offer in the area of energy harvesting, photovoltaics and perhaps in understanding the mechanisms of photosynthesis in plants and biomimetic approaches to the same things.  So I think and hope that soft matter is going to be important in the future. 

Which scientific discoveries have you been responsible for?

I think that I more or less discovered the possibility of using electrostatic attraction to steer assembly in various ways.  I co-discovered polyelectrolyte multilayers with a few others in the world. I think I also shed a lot of light on how they can be understood.

Collaborations form a large part of modern scientific research. Which scientist, past or present, would you really like to work with?

Well the one person that I very much admire and I would like to work with is the late Pierre Gilles de Gennes, a physicist from France. I happened to spend a year in his lab as a postdoc and that was an absolutely fascinating time.  Of course I can't work any more with him, nobody can, but I think that his legacy is carried forth by a couple of people. Other people that I would like to work with for a while are Mike Cates and Wilson Poon in Edinburgh.  It's a very interesting place where I could learn a lot and join in with their modelling and experimental work.                                        

What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?

I have a great hobby which is music. I play the bassoon myself and with a small ensemble and if I have time that's what I like to do.  I also like outdoor life and hobby farming. I have a place in Normandy, France where I go to grow my fruit trees.

And finally, if you weren't a scientist, what would you do?

I think I could have been a professional musician.  There was a deciding moment in my life when I had taken the entrance exam to a music conservatoire and had been offered a place to do a PhD. In the end I decided I'd prefer to be a happy amateur rather than a frustrated professional in music and I went for science.