Background:
Clare is a chemical engineer by training, having completed her undergraduate (integrated Masters) and PhD degrees at the University of Cambridge. For her MEng project, she modelled the patterns formed by blood spots during drying, under the supervision of Prof. Alex Routh. The project is important for developing accurate paper diagnostics using blood spots. She also undertook a number of industrial summer internships, including in R&D at Procter & Gamble. Her PhD work examined how a mixture of differently sized particles self assembles in a thin film as it dries. For this work, she won the 2023 Lighthill-Thwaites Prize from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and the 2023 Katharine Burr Blodgett Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry & Society of Chemical Industry (RSC & SCI).
Research Interests:
Clare moved to Oxford in October 2022 as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, hosted by the Oxford Colloid group. Her research addresses the need to make functional materials more sustainable, by using less of the expensive components, but still delivering the required properties. Her research interests include thin film materials, diffusiophoretic motion, and multiphase flow. She is currently working on measuring interparticle interactions. Outside of work, Clare can be found playing the violin, learning languages, and keeping active.
Expertise:
Colloidal hydrodynamics, thin film materials, modelling, numerical methods.
Publications:
[1] Rees-Zimmerman, C. R., Chan, D. H. H., Armes, S. P., & Routh, A. F. (2023). Diffusiophoresis of latex driven by anionic nanoparticles and their counterions. J. Colloid Interface Sci., 649, 364-371. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcis.2023.06.115.
[2] Rees-Zimmerman, C. R., & Routh, A. F. (2021). Stratification in drying films: a diffusion-diffusiophoresis model. J. Fluid Mech., 928, A15. https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2021.800.
[3] Rees-Zimmerman, C. R., & Chaffin, S. T. (2021). Modelling the effect of bioreactor height on stripping fermentation products from the engineered bacterium Geobacillus thermoglucosidasius. Biochem. Eng. J., 176, 108195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bej.2021.108195.
[4] Hertaeg, M. J., Rees-Zimmerman, C., Tabor, R. F., Routh, A., & Garnier, G. (2021). Predicting coffee ring formation upon drying in droplets of particle suspensions. J. Colloid Interface Sci., 591, 52-57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcis.2021.01.092.
Outreach publication:
[5] Rees-Zimmerman, C. R. (2023, June). Controlling how paint dries. IMA Mathematics Today, 59(3), 74-75. https://ima.org.uk/22113/controlling-how-paint-dries/
