We here at ESMP want to congratulate the latest Docteur de l'Université du Luxembourg en Chimie, Najiya! Najiya successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, Fabrication and Tailoring of Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Tubes: Toward Bio-Compatible Microactuators for Organoid Cultures, on 10 March.

Häerzlech Gléckwonsch, Najiya!

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Eight years after the launch of the ESMP Website 2.0, we've decided it's finally time to launch website 3.0!

There are some works still in progress due to the migration (it turns out upgrading the program we used to manage the website meant quite a bit of effort was needed to transfer everything), but it's a good time to refresh many things, to update things, and to make a somewhat different and more mobile-friendly experience. We also now have a dedicated "Alumni" section filled with alumni resources for previous group members (separate from the internal pages for current group members) and are working on updating the details about the research that we do.

There will be further changes implemented as we work on getting the new website fully set up, so please be patient, and please feel free to send us any feedback if you have any. We hope you enjoy the new ESMP site!

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Jan was recently interviewed by Hanna Siemaszko for the SciLux podcast, in which he discusses how liquid crystals can be used to revolutionize research and technology in many fields and how this ties to our research in ESMP! You can have a listen through the link or through many other podcast providers.

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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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We are delighted to share that Jan's project BriCE (Novel Concrete Bridge Spatially-Distributed Monitoring Through Chromatic Liquid Crystal Elastomers), a collaboration with Dr. Numa Bertola of the Sustainable Concrete Structures group at the University of Luxembourg, was just funded by the University of Luxembourg Institute for Advanced Studies! This four-year project will investigate further use of our mechanochromic liquid crystal elastomers to monitor the structural health of bridges, detecting cracks and failures as early as possible.

Not from BriCE, but from our recent publication with Danièle Waldmann-Schmidt's group on using mechanochromic LCEs for monitoring crack formation in concrete

Even more good news to end the year; stay tuned for further updates!
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