ERC Starting Grant Awarded to Dr. Maja Vučkovac

Academy Research Fellow, Dr. Maja  Vučkovac and the leader of the Soft Adhesion and Interfaces Research Group at Aalto University has been granted a prestigious ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros for a project called STICKY to investigate the effect of electric charges on adhesion between soft materials in wet environments. In the STICKY project, she is developing a new electron adhesion microscope to uncover these mechanisms at the mesoscale, where molecular interactions determine material behaviour.

The findings could lead to tangible improvements in biomedical engineering, for example, with better implants, artificial tissues or drug delivery systems, and enable new technologies in soft robotics and underwater adhesives.

Dr. Maja Vučkovac received her PhD in 2018 from the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University. Her research explores soft matter physics and adhesion in liquid environments, with a focus on how tissue-like materials adhere to other soft materials, such as wound dressings and soft patches.

She leads a project granted from the Research Council of Finland on developing a soft matter adhesion microscope to study how interface deformations, instabilities, fluid flows, and material elasticity govern adhesion in Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquids. Through her Business Finland R2B project ULTRAFORCE, she is advancing cantilever force sensors capable of operating across varying humidity and temperature conditions, covering forces from the piconewton to the newton scale. Dr. Vučkovac is also part of the VASC-NET consortium (a UNITE! funded project), where she applies force spectroscopy to study how cell aggregates and tissues exert forces on scaffolds, aiming to uncover the collective behavior of living matter under diverse environmental conditions.

Her ERC Starting Grant project, STICKY, will establish a novel electron adhesion microscope to investigate how charge dynamics influence soft wet adhesion. In particular, she will study how tissue-like probes adhere to charged soft materials in liquid environments that mimic living systems.

Congratulations to Dr. Maja Vuckovac her great achievements! Leran more about Dr. Maja Vuckovac and her research at: Soft Adhesion and Interfaces Research Group

Date: 4.9.2025