Question: What will your research with oil in water help with?

Guido Bolognesi answered on 12 Mar 2015:

Hi Georgie,
that’s a good question.

Usually, scientists prefer to work with very simple system (we call them models) in order to understand how they work and what are their potential. After this step, we start to make systems much more complicated to perform difficult and advanced tasks.

The final goal of my research has to do with chemistry and the encapsulation of chemical substances into small objects (like droplets). Now, the simplest system you can think of is an oil droplet in water (or a water droplet in oil). We are now study how light interacts with these objects. We can trap, deform and move them. Once we know exactly how the system work and how to control it, we can start to work with more complicated system. For instance, we can put a drug into a droplet, deform it into the shape of a red blood cells and make it solid. We now end up with an object which resemble a red blood cells but it is not and it have a drug in it. This could be a potential drug to cure people. The drug is now hidden like a red blood cell and it can reach parts of the body that other drugs, encapsulated in spherical capsule, cannot reach. That is one way how my research on oil in water droplet could help other people.