Guillermo Amador

Guillermo J Amador is an assistant professor in the Experimental Zoology group at Wageningen University and Research. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela and grew up in the USA. In 2015, he obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Through his dissertation, titled How Insects Stay Clean, he investigated the methods by which plants and animals, especially insects, maintain a stable external state, either by preventing airborne particle deposition or effectively removing accumulated particles. His thesis was awarded Best PhD Thesis award by the Sigma Xi organization. He made several discoveries during his dissertation, including how: mammalian eyelashes evolved to a specific length to protect the vulnerable, wet eye from contamination and evaporation, flying insects use hairs interspersed throughout their compound eyes to divert particle-laden airflows, the hairs throughout the bodies of pollinating insects are tuned for effective accumulation and removal of pollen grains, and splash-cup plants use conical flowering bodies to catch falling raindrops that disperse their micrometer-scaled seeds up to 10 plant heights away. After his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physical Intelligence group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, where he investigated the controlled transfer of complex media through interactions across interfaces, especially how fibrillar adhesives on the footpads of beetles remove microparticles while climbing. Then, he moved to the Netherlands where he worked as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Leading Fellow in the departments of Process & Energy and Bionanoscience at TU Delft studying how cells interact with their fluid environments. Through his research, he hopes to address many questions concerning the physical role of biological form, as well as motivate bio-inspired solutions for interfacing with complex environments.