Originally from Germany and from the field of nanomagnetism, Miriam comes to us after finishing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany). She decided to take the plunge into soft matter physics and join us this year on the ALCEMIST project, working on transforming cellulose into liquid crystal elastomeric materials.

Häerzlech Wëllkomm, Miriam!

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Originally from Kerala, India, Rijeesh did his Ph.D. in Life Science at Hokkaido University in Japan before moving to Kyushu University for a postdoc. He first came to ESMP in 2018, stayed with us for five years, then moved to the group of Arri Priimägi at Tampere University in Finland. He has since returned to Luxembourg to work on many of our chemistry-heavy projects, such as BriCE, ALCEMIST, and COSAMOS, with a focus on polymerizable liquid crystals for sensing and detection purposes.

Rebienvenue, Rijeesh!

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Originally from Taiwan, where she did her Ph.D., Chih-Chieh will be working on the BIOFLICS project to improve biological sensing with functionalized liquid crystal droplets. She will be taking over Yansong's role, as Yansong will be moving more towards working with Phil Dale's Laboratory for Energy Materials on the LETZCOLOR project.

After doing his Master's in India and his Ph.D. in Singapore, Vijay comes to us from a previous position at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. He's the first hire on the ALCEMIST project, in which he'll be working on the next generation of sustainable liquid crystal oligomers and elastomers derived from cellulose.

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• 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.