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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Welcome Alejandro (left) and welcome back Larry (right)

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 Sklodowska-Curie Action-funded project TECHSTILE, working to create wearable technology incorporating liquid crystal and liquid armor functionality.

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