Bubbles, foams and self-assembly: a conversation with Early Career Award winner Aurélie Hourlier-Fargette

Aurélie Hourlier‑Fargette is the winner of the 2025 JPhys Materials Early Career Award, presented in recognition of her research on “ Crystalline structures in foams: guided mechanical self-assembly of bubbles in fiber arrays “. Hourlier‑Fargette, a CNRS researcher at Institut Charles Sadron in Strasbourg, France, speaks with Aswathy Girija about the inspirations behind her interdisciplinary work, the opportunities she envisions for architected foams and how curiosity‑driven research opens new directions in architected materials and interdisciplinary science Award-winning research Aurélie Hourlier-Fargette with Marwan Chammouma, first author of the Emerging Leaders paper. The screen image shows one of the foams created as part of their study. (Courtesy: Aurélie Hourlier-Fargette) Congratulations on winning the 2025 JPhys Materials Early Career Award. What does this mean for you at this stage of your career? I am really grateful to the Editorial Board of JPhys Materials for this award and for highlighting our work. This is a key recognition for the whole team behind the results presented in this research paper. We were taking a new turn in our research with this topic – trying to convince bubbles to assemble into crystalline structures towards architected materials – and this award is an important encouragement to continue pushing in this direction. At the crossroads of physics, physical chemistry, materials science and mechanics, we hope that this is only the beginning of our interdisciplinary journey around bubble assemblies and foam-based materials. Your research explores elasto-capillarity and foam architectures, what inspired you to work in this fascinating area? I always say that research is a series of encounters – with people, and with scientific themes and objects. I was lucky to discover this interdisciplinary world as an undergraduate, during an internship on elasto-capillarity at the intersection of physics and mechanics. The scientific communities working on these topics – and also on foams – are fantastic. In both fields, I was fortunate to meet talented people who inspired my future work, combining scientific skills and creativity. In France, the GDR MePhy (mechanics and physics of complex systems) played a key role in broadening my perspective, by organizing workshops on many different topics, always with interdisciplinarity in mind. You have demonstrated mechanically guided self-assembly of bubbles leading to crystalline foam structures. What’s the significance of this finding and how could it impact materials design? In the paper, part of the journal’s Emerging Leaders collection , we provide a proof-of-concept with alginate and polyurethane materials to demonstrate that it is possible to use a fibre array to order bubbles into a crystalline structure, which can be tuned by choosing the fibre pattern, and to keep this ordering upon solidification to provide an alternative approach to additive manufacturing. This work is mainly fu