Mykola TasinkevychCo-Principal Investigator

Centre for Theoretical and Computational Physics, Faculty of Sciences, The University of Lisbon, Portugal
Department of Physics and Mathematics, Nottingham Trent University (NTU), United Kingdom

mykola.tasinkevych_at_ntu.ac.uk

Dr. Mykola Tasinkevych is an expert in computational soft condensed matter including theory of liquid crystal colloids, topological defects and solitonic excitations in liquid crystals. He holds MSc (Physics) and PhD (Chemistry) degrees from The University of Lviv (Ukraine) and The Institute of Physical Chemistry (Poland), respectively. His track record includes having been a Principal Investigator (PI) of 6 externally funded projects, raising a total of $1.3M; co-organising 7 international workshops (with ca. 70 participants in each), 3 of which were fully funded by dedicated grants, in a total of $190K. He has published 74 papers in high-impact journals, including Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, Physical Review Letters and others. During his work as a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Metals Research in Stuttgart, he coordinated in 2011-2015 a European Union-funded international network of 4 groups (USA, Germany, Portugal, and Ukraine) to study complex liquids at structured surfaces (grant number PIRSES-GA-2010-269181). From this collaboration, the first in situ x-ray diffraction study of the collapse of the superhydrophobic state in arrays of nano-sized geometrical features was published (Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 216101 (2014), with 139 citations). In 2013-2015, Tasinkevych led at the MPI a German Research Foundation-funded project (grant number TA 959/1-1), resulting in the first experimental implementation of the robust guidance of chemical self-propellers along arbitrary paths via minimal surface modifications (Nat. Commun. 7, 10598 (2016), with 338 citations). Before joining NTU as a senior lecturer in September 2021, Tasinkevych held a Principal Investigator position at the University of Lisbon. The position was secured in a highly competitive (15% success rate, with 1406 candidates) international call of the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, grant IF/00322/2015. In 2020 he has secured, a major FCT grant (PTDC/FIS-MAC/5689/2020) on Active Skyrmions in Liquid Crystal-Colloid Composite Media. Tasinkevych continues to coordinate this project until the end of 2023.