Jacob Judas KainKirkensgaard

Structural Food Physics and Soft Matter Self-Assembly

I am a soft matter researcher fascinated by self-assembly and the role of geometry in material science. I head the Structural Food Physics and Soft Matter Self-Assembly group at the University of Copenhagen Nanoscience Center, in a joint position between the Department of Food Science and the Niels Bohr Institute.

Ongoing research projects Available student projects

Portrait of Jacob Kirkensgaard — A slice through the gyroid: two interwoven channels, the kind of structure many soft materials assemble into.

Latest news

February 2026

Small-angle Scattering PhD-school in August
We are organising the 3rd edition of our so-far popular PhD-School on Small-angle scattering: Principles, data analysis and advanced modeling to be held at University of Copenhagen August 23rd to 28th. We will welcome a suite of excellent lecturers and again make heavy use of our tutorial resource Sastutorials.org. Please see website for latest details and signup.
January 2025

New ESS Lighthouse CaIFF
I am one of 3 PI's in a new ESS Lighthouse focused on Colloids and Interfaces in Food and Pharma. The center will recruit three new tenure-track assistant professors to strengthen the Danish Neutron community in colloid science.
June 2024

Small-angle Scattering phd-school in August
We are organising a new PhD-School on Small-angle scattering: Principles, data analysis and advanced modeling to be held at University of Copenhagen August 19th to 23rd. We will welcome a suite of excellent lecturers - please see website for latest details.
July 2023

Shape2SAS is out
Our paper on Shape2SAS is out - a web-application for simulation of solution scattering from geometric shapes - going from simple to quite complex shapes. Requires no installation so we have found it very useful for teaching purposes to explore basic concepts and generate fast virtual data to import into Sasview for example to learn how to fit models. Read the paper here.
April 2023

Back from down under
Just returned from a 2-month research stay at Dept. of Chemistry at University of Sydney where I was visiting my long-term collaborator Prof. Stephen Hyde. The visit also allowed me to interact with a range of other scientist in Sydney, including at the Australian neutron facility ANSTO. Further, I visited another collaborator at ANU in Canberra, Prof. Vanessa Robins and finally visited Prof. Gerd Schröder-Turk at Murdoch University in Perth where I gave a lecture for the Australian Institute of Physics about scattering methods in food science. Big thanks to the Carlsberg foundation and Niels Bohr Fondet for supporting the visit.
January 2023

Soft Matter paper accepted
Very proud of this work which had been a few years on the way. A gigantic effort by Martin Cramer Pedersen to make this work: we are presenting a new way of visualising and analysing patterns on negatively curved surfaces by mapping to the flat page using the Poincaré disc model of the hyperbolic plane. In analogy to a flat map of the earth, this allows to simplify very complex 3D patterns to 2D. Find the actual paper here