Hanneke Gelderblom wins Minerva Prize 2024

Hanneke Gelderblom, Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), has won the Minerva Prize 2024. The Minerva Prize is intended for young, promising female or non-binary physicists in the Netherlands, who excel in a field of physics, experimental and/or theoretical. The impact of Hanneke’s research is felt not only within the academic sphere but also in the high-tech industry.

Hanneke made seminal and outstanding contributions to the understanding of the evaporation of sessile colloidal droplets, of the freezing of sessile droplets, and of the fragmentation of thin liquid sheets, by theory, experiments, and numerical simulations. For all three subjects there had been outstanding fundamental questions, which Hanneke has solved.

Her ability to integrate theoretical, experimental, and numerical approaches has allowed her to solve fundamental questions in these areas, while her collaborations with industry partners such as ASML and ARCNL underscore the real-world relevance and impact of her work. Whether in the context of inkjet printing, diagnostics, or EUV lithography, Hanneke’s research continues to shape both the academic landscape and the high-tech industries that rely on fluid manipulation at small scales.

Hanneke Gelderblom obtained her MSc in Biomedical Engineering at TU/e (2009) and her PhD (cum laude) in Physics of Fluids at University of Twente (2013) with a thesis that won several prizes.  Following this, she became project leader of an Industrial Partnership Programme focusing on ‘Fundamental fluid dynamics challenges in extreme ultraviolet lithography’, a collaboration between Physics of Fluids in Twente, the company ASML and NWO.

The Minerva Prize is a joint initiative of the Netherlands’ Physical Society (NNV) and the Dutch Physics Council (DPC). With the Minerva Prize, both institutions want to make a positive contribution to increasing gender diversity within the Dutch physics field. The prize comes with a cash prize of 5000 euro. The NNV/DPC Minerva Prize award ceremony will take place during NWO Physics on 21 January 2025, where Hanneke will also give a lecture about her work.