After a lot of preparatory work, the 52nd German Liquid Crystal Conference has come and gone, seemingly in a flash: two and a half days of fascinating liquid crystal research in the form of interesting talks and posters in the unique environment of Campus Belval. We sincerely thank all of the attendees, sponsors, and people who submitted abstracts for making this conference possible. We welcomed 118 participants to Luxembourg, representing 19 countries and territories, underscoring the truly international scope of liquid crystal research.

We look forward to seeing some/many of you at the next German Liquid Crystal Conference in Essen in 2027! (Or other conferences, wherever they show up.)

/LWH/

P.S. A special congratulations goes to our group members Tanja Avsievich and Miriam Fischer (pictured) for winning one of the poster prizes!

On 7 April, we in Luxembourg hosted the second ALCEMIST workshop! We welcomed our collaborators from the University of Cambridge and NOVA University of Lisbon as well as some of our other partners and collaborators (Apala Majumdar from the University of Manchester and Attila Dubecz from Helios Klinikum) to discuss the current state of the many prongs of the ALCEMIST project. Not only was it nice to bring the whole team together physically (including our newly joined ALCEMIST team members), but we also enjoyed glorious spring weather for the occasion.

/LWH/

It is our pleasure to announce that we here at ESMP, in cooperation with the Physics of Living Matter Group of Prof. Anupam Sengupta, will be hosting the 2026 edition of the German Liquid Crystal Conference! From 8 through 10 April 2026, we'll be welcoming liquid crystal researchers from Germany and across Europe to the Belval campus (Esch-sur-Alzette) for two and a half days of liquid crystal research of all flavors, from optics and novel materials (including ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals) to applications such as sensing, actuators, rubbers, and security.

More information to come on the official conference website (lcsoftmatter.com/glcc2026); we look forward to seeing you all in Belval next spring!

/LWH/

Last week, Jan, Tadej, and Alejandro all presented at the "Isaac Newton Institute Workshop on the Mathematics, Mechanics, and Applications of Soft Matter", hosted by Prof. Apala Majumdar and Dr. Prabakaran Rajamanickam, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. This was a small workshop on many aspects of liquid crystals and soft matter in general: Jan presented some based on our work on liquid crystal elastomers, while Alejandro presented on direct programming of the director in LCE sheets and Tadej presented on acoustic activation of nematic tactoids.

\LWH\

Jan and Larry attended this year's European Liquid Crystal Conference in Prague, hosted by the Czech Academy of Sciences! Jan presented on some of Najiya's and Nikolay's work related to artificial vasculature with liquid crystal elastomer tubes (recently published), while Larry presented on some of his previous work. We also got the chance to explore and enjoy Prague, the place where liquid crystals were first discovered by Friedrich Reinitzer.

\LWH\

Last week we hosted the 45th German Liquid Crystal Conference & it was a great success.

Many thanks to all of our collaborators & the participants for a great three days of discussions, talks & prizes.

Be sure to check the website : http://www.lcsoftmatter.com/glcc18lux/ for photos of the conference soon!







/CGR/