This past week, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Chinedum Osuji from the University of Pennsylvania to Luxembourg for a colloquium! Not only did we get to hear about the fascinating active matter research happening in his group, but we were able to show him a bit of what we do here at ESMP as well as around Luxembourg.

By a happy coincidence, though, one of Prof. Osuji's recently graduated Ph.D. students, Yvonne Zagzag, will be officially joining ESMP in the New Year and was already in Luxembourg, so we had the chance to welcome them both! While Prof. Osuji has already left, we are definitely looking forward to working with Yvonne (more details to come).

/LWH/

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 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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We are very glad to have Assistant Professor Francesco Basoli from the Università Campus Bio-Medico in Rome, Italy, visiting us as invited researcher in March. He will support the INTERACT project with his expertise on electrospinning of functional polymer fibers.

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Our collaborator at the Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology (Suwon, Korea), Mathew Schwartz, visits the ESMP group in the beginning of May, giving a talk entitled "Research problem finding and solving through Art and Design". In connection to this visit we had intense discussion around our work on soft robotics within the project INTERACT.