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2024

New Publications and New Horizons

A lot has been happening in ESMP since our last website update! To give a rundown:
  • We recently have had several publications go online: one as a collaboration between David Walba's and Apala Majumdar's group (with group alumni Anjali and Mitch) in Soft Matter; one with Danièle Waldmann-Diederich's group at TU Darmstadt in Structural Health Monitoring; and one in Physical Review E with Apala Majumdar's group as well on the dynamics of liquid crystal shells.
  • In collaboration with Eugene Terentjev of the University of Cambridge and Maria Helena Godinho of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Jan recently was awarded an ERC Synergy grant for their proposal ALCEMIST on making more sustainable liquid crystal elastomers from cellulose. This is a big project that we're looking forward to, and more details on this will come in the new year. (This also means we'll probably be posting positions soon!)
  • As group members prepare to leave, we also will be passing the mantle of certain roles onto other people, and we now have a new website coordinator! Larry Honaker, our recently rejoined postdoc, will be handling website content and management for the foreseeable future; this also means that the website will soon be overhauled with a new version to hopefully launch by the end of the year.

/LWH/
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Welcome Emily

Welcome Emily,

Emily is a visiting PhD student from Prof. Emily Davidson's research group in Princeton University, USA. In our group, she is investigating the effect of chiral dopants on spontaneous symmetry-breaking in monodisperse 'flexible' bent-core LC oligomers she has synthesized. She is also working on tuning liquid crystal elastomer phase behavior, actuation, and optical properties via the chemical incorporation of these 'flexible' bent-core LC's.
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Welcome Alejandro and Larry

Welcome Alejandro(left) and welcome back Larry(right)
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This August we have two postdocs join us.

Alejandro will work on the LiCER(Liquid-crystal Elastomer Robotics) project, which aims to design and develop an instrumented actuator from liquid crystal elastomers to build an endoscope soft robot.

Larry did his Ph.D. in our group. After 4 years postdoc stay at Wageningen University & Research, he return to ESMP to work on the Marie Sktodowska-Curie Action-funded project TECHSTILE, working to create wearable technology incorporating liquid crystal and liquid armor functionality.

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Welcome Rebecca

Welcome back Rebecca,

After one year, Rebecca finished her B.S. in Industrial Design and come back for an internship to help our group members construct equipment and experimental setups for various projects.
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New publication

It's time to congrats to myself, Yucen, Yansong, Yong, Apala and Jan for a new paper: Tunable templating of photonic microparticles via liquid crystal order-guided adsorption of amphiphilic polymers in emulsions on nature communications
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