Outi Supponen wins the ESRF Young Scientist Award 2026

“I am delighted to receive the ESRF Young Scientist Award 2026, which is a recognition of my work and its importance for future applications”, says Supponen.

The jury of the award, led by Christian Gutt, stated the reasons to award the prize to Supponen: “Outi Supponen is recognized for her pioneering work in interfacial and multiphase fluid dynamics, where she has successfully introduced ultra-high-speed X-ray phase-contrast imaging as a transformative measurement tool. By exploiting the exceptional coherence and photon flux of the ESRF-EBS, her research has provided unprecedented experimental access to fast and complex phenomena such as cavitation, bubble dynamics, shock waves, and acoustically driven instabilities. Her work bridges fundamental fluid dynamics with applications in biomedical, process, and energy engineering, and has led to a series of high-impact publications as well as new experimental methodologies now influencing the broader fluid-dynamics community.”

Bubble control for drug delivery or kidney stone treatment

Cavitation is a phenomenon in which vapour bubbles form and collapse in liquids that experience strong pressure fluctuations, such as those induced by high-speed flows or strong acoustic waves.

When controlled, the bubble dynamics can be exploited in various biomedical therapies using high-amplitude sound waves, such as drug delivery, tissue ablation or kidney stone fragmentation. To accelerate these emerging therapies, researchers need to better understand the relevant cavitation dynamics.

“The dynamics involved are challenging to experimentally observe as they typically involve small scales and extremely high speeds”, explains Supponen. She has been a user at the ESRF since 2022: “ID19 is the perfect tool: we perform X-ray imaging to image acoustic cavitation phenomena with imaging rates up to millions of frames per second”, she adds.

More recently, Supponen and her team have started combining the high-speed visualisations with computed microtomography to obtain 3-D scans of their acoustically treated samples, also possible at ID19, to quantify the damage the vapor bubble activity causes in them.

Supponen has also been awarded an ERC Starting grant, which has officially begun this year. In her ERC project, she aims to continue investigating the formation and dynamics of cavitation bubbles and how they interact with their environment.

Text by Montserrat Capellas Espuny