Prof. Davor Lindqvist

Biography

Davor Lindqvist joined Veyra Institute in 2014, where he holds the Aldermere Chair in Polymer Materials. He completed his postdoctoral research at the Ostergaard Institute for Macromolecular Chemistry, studying the thermodynamics of microphase separation in multiblock systems. He received his PhD in polymer physics from the Technical University of Branneby in 2010, with a dissertation on kinetic trapping in block copolymer thin films, and his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Varenholm College in 2005, graduating top of his year.

At Veyra, Lindqvist established the Soft Matter & Self-Assembly Group with a mission to understand and control the spontaneous organisation of soft materials across length scales — from nanometre-scale polymer domains to micrometre-scale colloidal crystals. The group has made influential contributions to directed self-assembly of block copolymers on chemically patterned substrates, developing a family of ligand-exchange protocols that enable sub-10 nm feature registration. Their work on thermoresponsive hydrogels — materials that undergo reversible volume-phase transitions in response to temperature or pH — has opened pathways to drug-delivery and adaptive membrane applications. The group's simulation suite SoftPack is freely available and used by over thirty research groups worldwide.

Lindqvist has been principal investigator on five externally funded research grants totalling over 8.2 million cr in direct costs, including a current large programme grant from the Veyra Materials Innovation Fund. He currently supervises four doctoral students and three postdoctoral researchers, and has graduated twelve PhD students who hold positions in academia and industry across seven countries. He lectures the graduate course Thermodynamics of Soft Matter each spring and co-leads the Institute's annual Winter School on Polymer Self-Assembly, which draws participants from across the region.

Research interests

Selected publications

1. Lindqvist D, Eriksen S, Vasquez-Mora C. "Sub-10 nm directed self-assembly of PS-b-PMMA on chemical epitaxy: defect density and registration statistics." ACS Macromolecular Design, 18(4): 891–907, 2025. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2503
2. Vasquez-Mora C, Lindqvist D. "Thermoresponsive PNIPAM-co-AAm hydrogels with tunable lower critical solution temperature: swelling kinetics under osmotic confinement." Soft Matter Quarterly, 21(2): 334–349, 2024. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2416
3. Lindqvist D, Holmberg J, Reyes-Okafor N. "Colloidal crystal templating via binary hard-sphere sedimentation: phase diagram mapping and photonic stop-band control." Langmuir Communications, 39(11): 4102–4115, 2023. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2321
4. Eriksen S, Lindqvist D, Mäkinen T. "Kinetic arrest versus equilibrium morphology in triblock terpolymer thin films: a combined GISAXS and coarse-grained MD study." Macromolecular Theory and Simulation, 32(1): 55–72, 2022. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2210
5. Lindqvist D, Vasquez-Mora C. "pH-triggered volume transitions in polyelectrolyte hydrogels: a scaling theory for non-affine swelling." Journal of Polymer Science — Theory, 60(8): 1789–1803, 2022. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2205
6. Lindqvist D, Holmberg J. "Ligand-exchange protocols for sub-20 nm colloidal assembly on hydroxyl-terminated brush layers." Proceedings of the Branneby Symposium on Functional Nanostructures, pp. 119–131, 2021. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2117

Current group members

Postdoctoral researchers

• Dr. Sofia Vasquez-Mora — thermoresponsive hydrogels, volume-phase transition kinetics
• Dr. Samu Eriksen — block copolymer thin films, directed self-assembly simulation
• Dr. Tuulikki Mäkinen — coarse-grained molecular dynamics of multiblock systems

Doctoral students

• Jonas Holmberg — binary colloidal crystal growth and photonic properties (Year 4)
• Nkechi Reyes-Okafor — pH-responsive polyelectrolyte gels for drug release (Year 3)
• Astrid Laukkanen — surface-grafted polymer brush confinement effects (Year 2)
• Mikael Ozturk — machine-learning-assisted morphology prediction in block copolymers (Year 1)