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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team, visitors

We have the pleasure of hosting Dirk Jan Mulder, Ph.D. candidate in the group of Prof. Albert Schenning, Technical University of Eindhoven, during November. Dirk Jan is working on microfluidic liquid crystal elastomer shell production together with Rao and Kevin (see action pictures from the yellow lab), and also on porous shell production together with JungHyun.

visitors, esmp group

Domenico Alj, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calabria, visits the ESMP group for one month to work on alignment of cholesteric phases of cellulose nanocrystal suspensions. The visit is within the framework of the COST network IC1208.

visitors

We are glad to welcome Vianna Chan, Michelle Park and Laura Saunders to our group! They constitute the fourth round of visitors within the NSF-funded IRES (International Research Experience for Students) project led by our collaborator Prof. Antal Jakli at Kent State University, Kent (OH), USA. Michelle (left), Laura (middle) and Vianna (right) will be working with electrospinning and electrospray of fibers/beads with liquid crystal core.

visitors

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.

visitors, seminar

Also this summer we have the pleasure to host three students from the USA, within the framework of an NSF-funded IRES program devoted to liquid crystal fibers and filaments, headed by Prof. Tony Jakli at Kent State University (co-PIs are Prof. Margaret Frey, Cornell, and Prof. John West, Kent State University). This year our visitors are Emily Kerr, Aditi Naik and Vanessa Sanchez. Here you see them enjoying Luxembourgish Flammkuchen together with Jan and Catherine (who is the local group member working the most with them during their stay).

visitors, esmp group, students

We welcome (from left to right) Michael Varga, Collin McGinty (both Kent State University) and Catherine Reyes (Cornell University) as visitors of the ESMP group from 21st of June to 26th of July 2014. Their visit is part of an IRES project managed by our collaborator Tony Jakli at Kent State University, including also Margaret Frey at Cornell and Ralf Stannarius and Alexey Eremin at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany. While in Luxembourg, the three will be working on electrospinning core-sheath nano- and microfibers functionalized by low molar mass materials in the core.

visitors, collaborations