Eleonora Secchi is currently the Principal Investigator of the bioMatter Microfluidics Group in the Institute of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She earned a B.A. in Physical Engineering, an M.Sc. in Nuclear Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry from the Polytechnic University of Milan. Her graduate research work focused on the development of optical correlation techniques and their application to the study of biological and soft matter systems. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Lyderic Bocquet in the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique at Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, working on the measurement of water flow from a single carbon nanotube, which allowed her to answer a long-debated question on water slippage at the carbon–water interface. She was awarded an ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2016 to join the group of Prof. Roman Stocker at ETH Zurich, where she became interested in understanding the influence of hydrodynamic conditions on bacterial surface colonization. In 2018, thanks to a Swiss National Science Foundation PRIMA grant, Eleonora started her research group. Its name, the bioMatter Microfluidics Group, reflects the focus and approach of her research: understanding the physical mechanisms influencing the behavior of biological matter, in particular bacterial biofilms, using microfluidics. Through her research, Eleonora seeks to understand the environmental factors and the physical mechanisms influencing bacterial transport, surface colonization, and biofilm formation in fluids, with a specific focus on the biofilm matrix — “the dark matter of biofilms”. She exploits the precision afforded by microfluidics, combined with visualization techniques borrowed from soft matter physics, to understand the role of flow in biofilm community assembly and dispersal, and to access the microstructure and the rheology of bacterial systems, with the ultimate goal of linking structural properties to their biological function.
