Dr. Huachuan Du
Main Focus
Trained at the interface of bio-inspired materials, Huachuan brings expertise from his PhD in biomineralization and droplet-based microfluidics, as well as from his postdoctoral work on the self-assembly and chirality of peptide-based supramolecular systems, including his efforts to translate these fundamental principles toward applications in neuroregenerative medicine. Building on this foundation, his research at SBM focuses on bio-inspired supramolecular organic–inorganic hybrid materials, with an emphasis on optical functions.
Huachuan is particularly interested in:
- Bottom-up design of architected organic–inorganic materials through supramolecular assembly and hybridization
- Chirality transfer and asymmetric amplification during hierarchical construction
- Stimuli-responsiveness and adaptation, including autonomous behaviors under far-from-equilibrium conditions
- Emergent optical properties arising from dynamic, hierarchical architectures
Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Huachuan Du is a group leader in the Department of Sustainable and Bio-inspired Materials, headed by Prof. Silvia Vignolini, at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.
He received a BEng (2013) in Polymer Materials and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology (China) and an MSc (2015) in Materials Science from EPFL (Switzerland). In December 2019, he obtained his PhD in Materials Science from EPFL under the supervision of Prof. Esther Amstad, with the thesis “Water: its influence on the formation and crystallization of amorphous calcium carbonate”.
Following unexpected career interruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and U.S. visa constraints, he began his postdoctoral training in March 2021 as a Visiting Postdoc in Prof. Viola Vogel’s group at ETH Zurich (Switzerland), with the remote supervision from Prof. Samuel I. Stupp (Northwestern University, U.S.). In September 2021, he moved to the group of Prof. E. W. (Bert) Meijer at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, the Netherlands) to continue his postdoctoral research, co-supervised by Prof. Stupp. His postdoc work was supported by two consecutive Swiss National Science Foundation Mobility Fellowships (Early Postdoc.Mobility and Postdoc.Mobility). He joined the Department of Sustainable and Bio-inspired Materials (SBM) as a Group Leader in February 2026.
Publications
https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=hSQ59k8AAAAJ&hl=en
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1684-4430