Prof. dr. Marleen Kamperman received her PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. From 2008 to 2010, she was a postdoctoral researcher at INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken, Germany. She started her group ‘Bioinspired Functional Polymers’ as Assistant Professor at Wageningen University in the Physical Chemistry and Soft Matter department in September 2010. In 2014, she was a visiting professor in the Soft Matter Sciences and Engineering Laboratory at ESPCI ParisTech, Paris, France. In 2018 she was appointed Full Professor in Polymer Science at the University of Groningen. Her group is positioned at the interface of chemistry, biology and physics and is interested in the biologically inspired processing and synthesis of polymeric materials. She is fascinated by the emerging understanding that liquid coacervate phases are crucial in the processing of many different biological material systems. Her group pioneered the design of complex coacervate-based adhesives that solidify upon specific environmental triggers.

Kamperman received several (inter)national fellowships, prestigious awards and personal grants, including the KNCV Van Marum Medal from the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society (2018), VENI/VIDI and Athena grants from NWO (2010/2014), and an ERC Consolidator Grant of the European Union (2019) for her work in the areas of polymer science and physical chemistry. She is scientific director of the Health Technology Research & Innovation Cluster (HTRIC) of the University Medical Centre Groningen and University of Groningen and a board member of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials. On a national level she was elected to the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (DJA-KNAW) in 2015. She is chair of the NWO Advisory Committee “Physics of Fluids and Soft Matter”, and a member of the Dutch Chemistry Council and of the Dutch Network of Women Professors (LNVH). Internationally, she is an Executive Committee Member of the Adhesion Society and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of DWI Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials.

Top 3 publications

Maan, A.M.C., Hofman, A.H., de Vos, W.M., Kamperman, M., Recent developments and practical feasibility of polymer-based antifouling coatings, Advanced Functional Materials (2020) 2000936. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202000936

In this invited review we discuss the current status of the research field of polymeric antifouling coatings. This paper was among the top 10 most downloaded papers in 2020 in Advanced Functional Materials. 

Dompé, M., Cedano-Serrano, F.J., Vahdati, M., Westerveld, L. van, Hourdet, D., Creton, C., Gucht, J. van den, Kodger, T., Kamperman, M., Underwater adhesion of multiresponsive complex coacervates, Advanced Materials Interfaces (2020) 7, 1901785. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/admi.201901785

This paper explores the solidification of liquid coacervate phases in response to changes in ionic strength and temperature. The focus on bioinspired processing led to several new collaborations to further study structural changes during solidification by means of X-ray scattering (Portale group), solid-state NMR (Van der Wel group) and molecular dynamics simulations (Onck and Guintoli group).

Dompé, M., Cedano-Serrano, F.J., Heckert, O., Heuvel, N. van den, Gucht, J. van den, Tran, Y., Hourdet, D., Creton, C., Kamperman, M., Thermoresponsive complex coacervate-based underwater adhesive, Advanced Materials (2019) 1808179. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201808179

Here we showed for the first time that complex coacervates can be coupled to thermoresponsive moieties and that this combination can be successfully applied as an underwater adhesive. This was picked up immediately by the field and therewith highly cited.