Title of the project: Magnetic nanogels
Name of the VDSP student: Ivan Novikau
Project supervised by: Sofia Kantorovich

I am working in the Dipolar Soft Matter group, which mainly deals with computer modeling of systems of the same name. Sometimes I like to enjoy the singing of a yellow-headed king at the edge of a quiet forest.

My work is devoted to a soft matter system that has a potential in medical applications. It is about targeted drug delivery. The main concept of utilizing this material consists in the encapsulation of toxic anti-cancer drug inside these gels alongside with magnetic nanoparticles. One then could inject the suspension of nanogels into the human body, target it to the tumor by means of gradient magnetic field, then by applying an alternating magnetic field, the gels can be forced to release the drug. Recently we started to investigate the behavior of magnetic nanogels in the flow. In particular, at the moment I am studying the effects of hydrodynamics within the Lattice-Boltzmann scheme for an individual gel in the shear flow. We have observed, that the gel wobbles under this flow, and the frequency of these oscillations is associated with shear rate.

Kantorovich group