Earlier this week, some of the ALCEMISTs from NOVA and the University of Luxembourg got the chance to attend a workshop on at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Self-Assembly in Golm (near Potsdam)! Hosted by Prof. Silvia Vignolini of the Department of Sustainable and Bio-Inspired Materials, this workshop looked at how cellulose nanocrystals can form liquid crystalline structures and some of their possible applications. Jan and Lena presented talks for the occasion, and Amina and Luís also joined and participated in the discussions.

photo credit: Silvia Vignolini

On 25 September, the ALCEMIST team from NOVA University of Lisbon participated in the 2026 Noite Europeia dos Investigadores (European Researchers' Night) at the Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC) of the University of Lisbon! With a strong focus this year on sustainability, this was a great venue for us to present our work on processing of liquid crystal elastomers from sustainable materials and some of the ways we can use liquid crystal elastomers in sustainability applications.

photo credit: Lena Godinho

Tags: CLCEs

For the second workshop (and fourth official meeting) of the ALCEMIST project, we met at the University of Cambridge on 7 and 8 September 2026!

the almost complete ALCEMIST team, University of Cambridge

During this meeting, we updated everyone on the current progress in our ALCEMIST tasks and the plans we have for the next stages of the project.

During the workshop, we also had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Jaana Vapaavuori from Aalto University! She presented work on textile-based sensors and robotics (very neatly in the realm of ALCEMIST).

In addition to the scientific program, we also took advantage of the visit to Cambridge for discussions; for collaborations; to take in the sights; explore the campus and labs; and to have dinner at The Eagle, a famous pub known for being where James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the structure of DNA and the canonical amino acids.

Overall, it was a successful visit, and we're looking forward to seeing everyone's progress at the next meeting in Lisbon!

Tags: workshop

The ALCEMISTs from NOVA published an invited Perspective paper highlighting the emerging potential of solvent-free thermotropic cellulose liquid crystals as sustainable photonic materials by connecting molecular chirality, hierarchical self-assembly, processing, and optical functionality. Its main novelty is providing an integrated framework for understanding and designing adaptive cellulose-based photonic systems, directly supporting ALCEMIST's objective of establishing predictive design principles for renewable structural colour materials.

The paper, titled Cellulose-based self-assembled photonic structures: linking chirality, structure and optical function across scales, is published (open access) in Journal of Physics: Photonics, 8, 021001, 2026. Please click here to read it.

Tags: CNC

The ALCEMIST team went to this year's International Liquid Crystal Conference in Québec, Canada! Lena and Jan both gave plenary talks while Luís presented a poster and, while not directly members of ALCEMIST, Yong Geng and Yosuke Pestana Nakamura presented ALCEMIST-adjacent work related to our fiber spinning projects.

Our collaborator Apala Majumdar from the University of Manchester also received the LG Mid-Career Prize from the ILCS!