We look forward to seeing how ShearView will be used, adapted, and extended in the coming years.

Many thanks to Austrian Science Fund @fwf-at.bsky.social and European Union (FORGreenSoft project) for supporting this research, and to the University of Vienna @univie.ac.at for making all this possible at the Faculty of Physics @univie-physik.bsky.social .

This work was carried out by Nikolaos Kalafatakis, combining instrument design, electronics, control software, data analysis, and experimental validation into a single, fully documented platform intended for real use beyond our own lab.

Open-source rheometer lowers barriers to synchronized rheology and microscopy studies A fully open-source platform provides a compact rheometer that can be easily combined with optical microscopy, allowing researchers to observe microscopic dynamics while materials are being deformed.

The article has also been featured as an
@aip.bsky.social SciLight:

“Open-source rheometer lowers barriers to synchronized rheology and microscopy studies.”

www.aip.org/scilights/op...

It presents the complete design, calibration, and validation of ShearView , together with representative experimental applications. Aim: lower technical and financial barriers to quantitive, reproducible and transparent rheo–microscopy experiments.

ShearView: A compact stress- and strain-controlled linear rheometer for integrated rheomicroscopy We present ShearView, a compact, cost-effective, and open-source linear rheometer, that enables both strain- and stress-controlled shear experiments, while bein

The full research article is now published in the Journal of Rheology

pubs.aip.org/sor/jor/arti...

📢 Publication alert

#rheology #openscience #microscopy

We are pleased to share our latest work on ShearView: a compact, open-source rheometer compatible with optical microscopy, designed to enable synchronized rheology–microscopy measurements.

Chavez in 2009, while being labelled as paranoid, outlines exactly what is happening today.

🚨 POSTDOC OPENING 🚨
NIH-funded Bio-Fluid Mechanics Postdoc in my lab @univmiami.bsky.social
Hofstenia miamia | cilia-driven flows | behavior & neuroscience
Collab w/ Mansi Srivastava @harvard.edu
🕒 Start: Jan–Feb 2026
⏳ 1 yr, renewable | Email me ASAP!
#Postdoc #Biophysics #FluidDynamics

I am putting together a collection of video-protocols we (will) use in tissue mechanics research🌀
I hope to help consolidate established methods, but also showcase a few up-and-coming ones in our blooming field.
Abstract submission by March 2026! Get in touch✨
#JoVETissueMech
#ReproducibleTissueMech

The Society of Rheology has a new look! Unveiled at the Santa Fe Annual Meeting last October, our new logo brings a modern edge while honoring nearly a century of advancing the science of flow. #Rheology #NewLogo #EverythingFlows

If you are interested in an interdisciplinary project connecting tissue mechanics, synthetic approaches and dev bio, this is the position for you! we are excited to get this colaboration started!!👇👇🤩🤓👇👇

I am … grateful? … that Harvard’s Graduate School Fund reached out to me with a fundraising solicitation yesterday, because it helped me to organize my thoughts on an event near the end of my PhD (2005). Here is my response, just emailed to the fundraisers: (1/9)

EPS Early Career Award for Vittoria Sposini Congratulations to Vittoria Sposini!

🏅 EPS Early Career Award for Vittoria Sposini 🏆

The former REWIRE Fellow at the group of Prof. Likos and current MSCA Fellow at the University of Padova (Italy), has been awarded the European Physical Society Early Career Award.

Learn more about her outstanding work:

🔗 a29.at/p4uJji

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled (ideally before the end of 2025).

Please boost or share with anyone who may be a good fit.

To apply, please send in a single PDF:

• motivation letter
• CV
• names of two referees

And ask your referees to send two recommendation letters directly.

Send everything to:
📩 martina.benedikt@univie.ac.at

Somex Lab A highly-customizable Hugo research group theme powered by Wowchemy website builder.

The position is fully funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) and hosted at the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna — a collaborative environment bridging soft and living matter.

Group page: somexlab.github.io

We are looking for:

PhD candidates with training in two or more of:
— rheology
— biophysics
— quantitative microscopy

or

Postdocs with independence and a strong track record in these areas.

Your main activities would include:

• Preparing and optimizing biomimetic systems
• Performing quantitative imaging and mechanical measurements
• Developing instrumentation at the interface of rheology & optics
• Building analysis workflows and simple models

We will build and apply new opto-rheological and rheomicroscopy tools to study:

• Biomimetic emulsions and vesicle systems
• Zebrafish gastruloids

In collaboration with:
— @dianapinheiro.bsky.social (IMP Vienna)
— @ehannezo.bsky.social (ISTA)

You would join an interdisciplinary team working at the intersection of:

• Experimental soft-matter physics
• Developmental biology
• Biophysics theory

Our central question: How do physical forces and molecular mechanosensing define the material properties of living tissues?

🔬 PhD or Postdoc Position in Experimental Biophysics — University of Vienna

We are hiring for the WWTF-funded project MechanoSynth — focused on decoding and engineering multiscale mechanoresponses in synthetic and biological tissues.

PhD (48 months) or Postdoc (24 months). Vienna, Austria.

The ceremony to award the Erwin Schrödinger Institute 2025 medal to Michele Parrinello has just finished. Thanks to the director @chhdellago.bsky.social and to the staff of @esivienna.bsky.social for the wonderful organization!

Thank you Conrad! Your opinion and feedback is very much appreciated!

The Hitchhiker’s guide to differential dynamic microscopy Over nearly two decades, differential dynamic microscopy (DDM) has become a standard technique for extracting dynamic correlation functions from time-lapse micr

We hope this guide will make DDM as common as DLS in soft-matter and biological labs.

Give it a try, share your results, and let’s make DDM part of every microscope’s toolkit!

Link to the paper:
pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/arti...

fastDDM comes with tutorial on using DDM to study:

- Colloidal suspensions
- Bacteria and active swimmers
- Microrheology of complex fluids
- Cells and tissues

The tutorial includes examples and notebooks for all of these.

We also introduce fastDDM — a new, open-source, high-performance implementation that makes DDM thousands of times faster and easy to use on large datasets.

🧰 Free, transparent, and ready for your next project.

We walk you through the complete pipeline ⬇️

🎥 Video acquisition → ⚡ Fourier analysis → 📊 Fitting → 🔍 Physical parameters

The same logic works for bright-field, phase-contrast, fluorescence microscopy, and beyond…

DDM lets you turn any microscopy video into a scattering experiment, revealing the dynamics of colloids, proteins, liquid crystals, foams, emulsions, cells, bacteria, or active matter directly from image sequences.

It’s like DLS, but with a microscope and a movie.

Are you interested in using Differential Dynamic Microscopy (DDM), but found it too difficult to just give it a try?

Fear no more. Our new tutorial is now published in J Chem Phys (link below) and it comes with open-source code and Python notebooks to make your life easy!