Author Archive

2016 Soft Matter Lectureship is awarded to Damien Baigl

We are delighted to announce Professor Damien Baigl (ENS/UPMC/CNRS) as the 2016 Soft Matter Lectureship winner.

The Soft Matter Lectureship, now in its seventh year, is an annual award that honours an early-stage career researcher for their significant contribution to the soft matter field. The recipient is selected by the Soft Matter Editorial Board from a list of candidates nominated by the community.

Read on to find out more about Damien…

Damien did a PhD on soft matter physics with Claudine Williams in the laboratory of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes at College de France in Paris before a post-doc in biophysics at Kyoto University with Kenichi Yoshikawa. Since 2005, he has been working at the UMR PASTEUR (ENS/CNRS/UPMC) laboratory located at the Department of Chemistry of Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS, PSL Research University) in Paris (France). He was appointed ENS assistant professor in 2005 before becoming full professor (2nd class) at University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC, Sorbonne Universités) in 2010 and 1st class UPMC professor in 2013. Former member of the Institut Universtaire de France (IUF), he got an ERC starting grant in 2010. Damien has made numerous, interdisciplinary and highly original contributions to the soft matter field in topics ranging from DNA compaction, gene expression photocontrol, synthetic biology and artificial cell systems to evaporative assembly, coffee-ring effect manipulations and light-driven microfluidics.

Damien’s website can be found at http://www.baigllab.com/

To learn more about Damien’s research, please see the following for his recent work in Soft Matter:

Preparation of one- to four-branch silver nanostructures of various sizes by metallization of hybrid DNA–protein assemblies
Sergii Rudiuk, Anna Venancio-Marques, Géraldine Hallais and Damien Baigl
Soft Matter, 2013, 9, 9146-9152

Theory of DNA–cationic micelle complexation
Helmut Schiessel, María D. Correa-Rodríguez, Sergii Rudiuk, Damien Baigl and Kenichi Yoshikawa
Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 9406-9411

DNA compaction: fundamentals and applications
André Estévez-Torres and Damien Baigl
Soft Matter, 2011, 7, 6746-6756

Sergii Rudiuk, Kenichi Yoshikawa and Damien Baigl
Soft Matter, 2011, 7, 5854-5860

Keep your eyes peeled for Damien’s upcoming Soft Matter article in honour of the Lectureship award.

We would like to thank everybody who nominated a candidate for the Lectureship; we received many excellent nominations, and the Editorial Board had a difficult task in choosing between some outstanding candidates.

Please join us in congratulating Damien in his fantastic achievements by adding your comments below!

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2015 Soft Matter Lectureship winner Lucio Isa invited speaker at APS March Meeting 2016

2015 Soft Matter Lectureship award winner Professor Lucio Isa (ETH Zürich) is an invited speaker at the American Physical Society March Meeting 2016, to be held on 14–18 March in Baltimore, USA.

Lucio’s talk “Soft particles at fluid interfaces: wetting, structure and rheology” will begin the “Soft Matter at Interfaces (Particles)” focus session, sponsored by the Topical Group on Soft Matter (GSOFT) unit of the APS and chaired by Soft Matter Editorial Board Chair Professor Michael Rubinstein.

To read more about Lucio and the 2015 Soft Matter Lectureship award, see this previous post on the Soft Matter blog.

Lucio being presented with his 2015 Soft Matter Lectureship award by Soft Matter Associate Editor Dimitris Vlassopoulos

Lucio’s most recent Soft Matter articles include:

Colloidal binary mixtures at fluid–fluid interfaces under steady shear: structural, dynamical and mechanical response
Ivo Buttinoni, Zachary A. Zell, Todd M. Squires and Lucio Isa
Soft Matter, 2015,11, 8313-8321

Adsorption of soft particles at fluid interfaces
Robert W. Style, Lucio Isa and Eric R. Dufresne
Soft Matter, 2015,11, 7412-7419

A multiscale approach to the adsorption of core–shell nanoparticles at fluid interfaces
Adrienne Nelson, Dapeng Wang, Kaloian Koynov and Lucio Isa
Soft Matter, 2015,11, 118-129

Highly ordered 2D microgel arrays: compression versus self-assembly
Karen Geisel, Walter Richtering and Lucio Isa
Soft Matter, 2014,10, 7968-7976
From themed collection 2014 Soft Matter Hot Papers

Keep an eye out for our announcement of the 2016 Soft Matter Lectureship award!

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Soft Matter Prize Winners at the 27th Symposium of the Research Group on Polymer Gels

Congratulations to Yuto Jochi and Nobuyuki Watanabe who both won Soft Matter sponsored prizes at the 27th Symposium of the Research Group on Polymer Gels, The Society of Polymer Science, Japan held at Tokyo University on 18–19 January 2016.

From left to right: Royal Society of Chemistry Manager: Hiromitsu Urakami, Prize winner: Yuto Jochi and Chair: Takao Aoyagi

The Soft Matter Poster Award was won by Nobuyuki Watanabe (not pictured), who is based at Tokyo University of Science, for his poster Probe diffusion in Polymer Solution and Gels.

The Soft Matter Presentation Award was awarded to Yuto Jochi from Nagoya University for his presentation One-pot Synthesis of Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) Gels with Homogeneous Polymer Network Structure.

We thank Mr Watanabe and Mr Jochi for their excellent contributions and we look forward to hearing more about them in the future!

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4th International Soft Matter Conference – abstract submission and registration now open!

Join keynote speakers and Soft Matter Associate Editors Jan Dhont, Christos Likos and Dimitris Vlassopoulos at The 4th International Soft Matter Conference (ISMC 2016), to be held in Grenoble, France from 12–15 September 2016.

Submit your abstract by 1 March 2016

Early bird registration ends 1 June 2016

This conference will cover both the fundamental and applied aspects of soft matter and complex systems – please see the scientific programme for more information. Organised locally by scientists from the large-scale facilities ILL and ESRF as well as from Grenoble University and other research organisations such as CEA, CNRS and INPG, the venue will be the conference centre Alpexpo in Grenoble.

Plenary speakers confirmed:

  • Matthias Ballauff, Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, Germany
  • Jasna Brujic, University of New York, USA
  • Joao Cabral, Imperial College, London, UK
  • Michael E. Cates, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Stefan W. Hell, MPI and University of Göttingen, Germany
  • Regine von Klitzing, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
  • Igor Musevic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Dieter Richter, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
  • Francesco Sciortino, University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

Submit your abstract now to get involved!

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