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/

With the new year, it is our pleasure to now welcome two new ESMP postdocs and a new visiting scientist: Yvonne Zagzag, Amina Alizade, and Mónica Arenas Correa!

Yvonne is a recently graduated Physics Ph.D. who joins us from Prof. Chinedum Osuji's group at the University of Pennsylvania. She joins us within the ALCEMIST project as a postdoc working at the intersection of theory and experiments, combining her theoretical knowhow with the many experiments in the project (and especially on fluid flow).

Originally from Georgia (the country), Amina joins us after her Ph.D. research in the group of Dr. Anne Jantschke at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, where she worked with cellulose extracted from dinoflagellates. Her role will be as the main chemist on the ALCEMIST project, working to develop the chemical tools and protocols to create cellulose-based liquid crystal elastomeric materials.

Mónica is the CEO of our spin-off company Trace Crystal and has joined ESMP as a visiting scientist to work further on developing the technology fueling the innovations at the company. (Hakam will still be with us, but in a different role.)


Häerzlech Wëllkomm!

/LWH/

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.

\XM

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.



\XM

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.

\AS

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.