Physical Acoustics Seminar: Valeria Garbin

Valeria Garbin, TITLE: Optical trapping studies of the dynamics of coated microbubbles in ultrasound ABSTRACT: Microbubbles stabilized by a thin coating are commonly used as contrast agent for ultrasound medical imaging. The dynamics of coated microbubbles in ultrasound has received increasing attention in the past two decades, since the development of predictive models for their acoustic response might open the way to the development of novel imaging protocols. I will present the research carried out in the Physics of Fluids Group at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) on the effect of a phospholipid monolayer coating on microbubble dynamics in ultrasound. We developed a setup that combines the custom ultra-high speed camera "Brandaris 128", which operates at up to 25 million frames per second, with optical tweezers, a tool to precisely control the position of the bubbles without affecting their dynamic response. During the seminar I will focus on our recent findings regarding the interplay between viscous and acoustic forces during bubble-bubble interactions. I will also present work currently underway on the non-linear phenomena of coated microbubbles. Finally, I will give a brief overview of our studies on microbubble dynamics in confined geometries. BIO: Valeria Garbin is presently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2007 she received a PhD in Physics from the University of Trieste (Italy), where she performed the first experiments on the dynamics of microbubbles in ultrasound using optical tweezers. She then continued to work on this subject as a postdoc in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) from 2007 to 2009. Valeria was awarded a Rubicon postdoctoral fellowship by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2007, and was a MISTI Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.