Institut Charles Sadron News
Publié le 19/11/2025 par Fall William
William arrived in October 2025 as Chargé de Recherche (CR) in the Theory & Simulation of Polymers Team (TSP) at ICS. He is a soft matter simulator focused on large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of polymers made possible through coarse-grained models he develops. His work touches on fundamental topics including polymer crystallisation, chirality, colloidal glasses, liquid crystal phase transitions and membrane self-assembly.
He defended his PhD in 2020 under the supervision of Professors Gillian A. Gehring, Xiangbing Zeng and Goran Ungar at the University of Sheffield. During his PhD he used statistical models of magnets to model liquid crystal phase transitions before branching into molecular dynamics simulations of polymers melting in quasi-2D to better understand experiments.
Later he joined the group of Prof Buddhapriya Chakrabarti & Dr Biswaroop Mukherjee at The University of Sheffield to model flavour migration in chewing gums for Mondelez. He then joined the Institut Charles Sadron as a PostDoc in 2022 under the supervision of Dr Hendrik Meyer and Prof Jörg Baschnagel to understand to role of short chain branching in semi-crystalline Polyethylene for TotalEnergies using molecular dynamics simulations. After this he moved to Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Orsay to work under the supervision of Dr Henrikus H. Wensink on the EU Horizon project INTEGRATE. There he modelled polymer grafted cellulose nanocrystal actuators and block co-polymer battery separator membranes.
His most recent project at the ICS aims to model large-scale semi-crystalline conjugated polymers to improve the efficiency of thermoelectric thin films in collaboration with SYCOMMOR.
William enjoys running, hiking, chess-boxing and cycling.
Members of the ICS during a recent visit of Prof Arthi Jayaraman to TSP. From right to left: William Fall, Hendrik Meyer, Daniel Grande, Delphine Chan-Seng, Joachim Wittmer, Fouzia Boulmedais, Jörg Baschnagel, Arthi Jayaraman, Wiebke Drenckhan & Olivier Benzerara.