Rate My Professor Halim Kusumaatmaja

Professor Halim Kusumaatmaja holds the Jason Reese Chair of Multiscale Fluid Mechanics in the School of Engineering at The University of Edinburgh, within the Mechanical Engineering discipline. He leads the Simulations of Soft Matter, Biophysics & Fluid Dynamics group, which relocated from Durham University to Room 2.2409 in the James Clerk Maxwell Building in May 2024. Affiliated with the Institute for Multiscale Thermofluids, his research operates at the interdisciplinary nexus of engineering, physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Core areas encompass multiscale fluid mechanics, soft matter, and biophysics, particularly wetting dynamics on structured, hydrophilic, hydrophobic, and liquid-infused surfaces; tunable droplet manipulation; capillary bridges; biomolecular condensate properties; lipid vesicle internalization; and nucleation and growth of mixed H2O–CO2 bubbles in magmas.

Kusumaatmaja obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford. He completed postdoctoral research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and the University of Cambridge. Progressing from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor and then Full Professor in the Department of Physics at Durham University, he retains a Visiting Professorship there. He holds a £1.1 million EPSRC Fellowship in Engineering. With 88 research articles and over 7,600 citations per Google Scholar, his contributions significantly influence the field. Select publications include "Multiple Equilibria Enables Tunable Wetting of Droplets on Patterned Liquid Surfaces" (Science Advances), "Non-invasive Measurement of Biomolecular Condensate Interfacial Tension and Bending Rigidity" (Cell Reports Methods, 2025), "Magnetically Reconfigurable Multistable Ribbon Arrays for Liquid Manipulation" (Device, 2025), "The nucleation and growth of mixed H2O–CO2 bubbles in magmas" (Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 2026), and "Stretching and Compressing Capillary Bridges on Hydrophilic, Hydrophobic, and Liquid Infused Surfaces" (Langmuir, 2026). Ongoing funded projects feature Scale Up Mathematics for Formulated Products (SUM4Products), Development of next generation disruptive mega-casting technologies for green and sustainable transportation vehicles (MegaCast), and Designing Structured Surfaces with Superwettability Properties.