Doctoral thesis success: Ruchi Goswami
Congratulations to Ruchi Goswami on successfully defending her doctoral thesis titled “Polyacrylamide Microgel Engineering for Mechanobiology” on 27th January 2026. Ruchi carried out her doctoral project at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, in Erlangen, supervised by the late Prof. Jochen Guck and co-supervised by Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini at the FAU, Institute of Biomaterials. The chair of the doctoral committee was Prof. Dirk Schubert (Department of Materials Science and Engineering, FAU), and examiners were Prof. Stefano Pagliara (Exeter University, UK), Prof. Silvia Budday (Department of Mechanical Engineering, FAU) and Prof. Boccaccini.
Prof. Boccaccini highlighted the innovative character of Ruchi’s project in the field of precision fabrication and characterisation of polyacrylamide based hydrogels via droplet microfluidics aimed at producing microgels that mimic cellular physical properties for mechanobiology research. He acknowledged the excellent research environment in which this project was carried out, the group of the late Prof. Jochen Guck and the great support of Dr. Salvatore Girardo at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen. Recently, a paper from the results of the thesis of Ruchi has been published in a high-impact journal [1]. Many congratulations to Ruchi on the successful defense of her doctoral thesis, we wish Ruchi all the best in her future career.
[1] R. Goswami, et al., Fine-tuning cell-mimicking polyacrylamide microgels: Sensitivity to microscale reaction conditions in droplet microfluidics, Materials & Design 262 (2026) 115450.
