Soft materials are ubiquitous, from engineering applications to biological tissues, but their rational design remains challenging for their emergent phenomena across the scales giving rise to complex structure-property relationships, often in out-of-equilibrium conditions. Our group develops molecular dynamics and multiscale computational models to address this challenge. On one side, we focus on fundamental open questions in soft matter and polymer physics in complex environments where heterogeneities, confinement, and out-of-equilibrium phenomena play a major role. On the other side we use this fundamental knowledge to understand what ingredients are needed to design optimal, sustainable materials towards a better environment (such as materials used for the energy transition) or a better life (such as materials used for biomedical applications).

We abide to the concept that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. Any model (theoretical or computational) of a natural phenomenon necessarily contains simplifications, assumptions, and limitations. A useful model then is not an exact replica of the system one wants to study, but one that contains the right elements to make useful predictions not accessible by the experiments. We often collaborate with experimental groups and we believe that extensive communication can help us bridge the gap between simulations and experiments in a multidisciplinary environment, ultimately leading to more useful models.

"In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography." -On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions