Dr. Semih Sevim
Semih Sevim was born in İzmir, Turkey (1989). He received both his BSc and MSc degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Boğaziçi University (İstanbul, Turkey), in 2013 and 2016 respectively. As a bachelor student, he worked on the “Ultra-stable molecular force spectroscopy with micromachined transducers (UTMOST)” project, funded by EC-FP7 Marie Curie Actions. He carried out his graduate study on the “Magnetic Nano Actuators for Quantitative Analysis (MANAQA)” project, funded by the European Commission (ICT FET-Open), and obtained his MSc degree by completing his thesis with the title “Design of a modified AFM setup with miniaturized-magnetic particle actuators for biomolecular applications”. As a result of his undergraduate and graduate studies, he contributed to five journal papers (four as a first author). His studies were supported by the Turkish Educational Foundation (TEV) with an undergraduate scholarship and an achievement award (2009-2013), and by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) with a graduate scholarship (2013-2015).
In January 2017, he moved to Switzerland to join Prof. de Mello’s group (ETH-Zürich) as a PhD student. He completed his PhD in 2021 under the direct supervision of Prof. Josep Puigmartí-Luis. His doctoral research mainly focused on controlled self-assembly of functional materials by employing microfluidic tools. Using microfluidic devices, he investigated pathway selection during the self-assembly of functional materials (e.g. a spin-crossover coordination polymer) to achieve controlled defect engineering, yielding new materials’ properties. Moreover, he utilized microfluidic devices as an effective processing tool to control self-assembly of functional materials on surfaces, e.g. to print functional materials (MOFs and COFs) and control their 2D/3D shape, to pattern functional thin films, as well as to achieve regioselective self-assembly. He participated in several national and international projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), European Research Council (ERC) and European Commission (EC). As a result of the above-mentioned projects as well as other collaborative research that he conducted during and prior to his PhD, he contributed to more than 15 journal papers (9 as a first or equal first author) published in high impact journals including Chemical Society Reviews, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, Advanced Science, JACS, Materials Horizons, etc. and a book chapter. During his doctoral studies, he was awarded twice with a COST Action Trainee Grant in 2017 and 2018 by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), and he received a Chemistry Travel Award in 2019 from the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT) and the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS).
In April 2021, he joined the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab as a postdoctoral associate. He currently holds the position of senior scientist and is conducting research on the manipulation and investigation of single plant cells within controllable microfluidic environments, as well as microfluidic-assisted fabrication and characterization of novel soft robots for biomedical applications