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.

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As our first post for 2025, it is our pleasure to welcome our newest group members, Dr. Tadej Emeršič and Mr. Churchill Agoni, to ESMP!

Originally from Slovenia, where he completed his Ph.D., Tadej comes to us from the University of Chicago, where he worked as a postdoc in the group of Juan de Pablo. He joins us on the INVISIMARK project, a project in cooperation with the Luxembourg Ministry of Defense, in which he'll be working with us for (at least) the next year and a half on the use of CSRs for secure identification purposes.

Churchill comes from Nigeria and joins us after his Master's studies in Photonics at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. He'll be working on the SHADOW project, a collaboration with the University of Ljubljana, on studying ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals under confinement.



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