Interview of Wassim Dhaouadi
© 2022 EPFL
Wassim Dhaouadi is a Tunisian engineer in mechanical engineering. He is known for having solved the Bretherton floating bubble problem in physics as a bachelor of science student at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Dhaouadi studied mechanical engineering and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2018 and a Master of Science degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) in 2020. As a student in John Kolinski's lab at EPFL, Dhaouadi solved the Bretherton floating bubble puzzle, a long-standing physics problem. Using an optical interference method, he proves the existence and measures the physical properties of a thin liquid film that had been proposed by physicists to explain why air bubbles appear to be trapped inside capillary tubes.
In 2020, Dhaouadi was named one of the world's ten most outstanding young people in the category of 'academic leadership' by the Junior Chamber International. He also received the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Ethics and Leadership Award from Columbia Business School.
He is currently working as an intern at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Dhaouadi, Wassim and Kolinski, John M., Bretherton's Buoyant Bubble, Physical Review Fluids, 2019, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.4.123601