10 March 2025
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!
\LWH\
03 February 2025
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.
\LWH\
09 October 2021
Congratulations to Dr. Shameek Vats who successfully defended his Ph.D thesis on Friday.
\XM
13 September 2021
Welcome to Deniz (left) and Lenka (right).
Deniz join our group as a new PhD candidate. She will work on "TRANSCEND Project": Transforming autonomous navigation, swarm robotics and construction by using Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors (CSRs) encoding data into surfaces.
Lenka is currently a PhD student at Tomas Bata University. She join our group as an intern. She will investigate the liquid crystalline behavior of collagen solution and try to utilize these properties in electro spun fibres.
\XM
14 June 2021
Congratulations to Anjali who recently defended her Ph.D thesis on "Liquid Crystal Shells: from Physics Mysteries, via Chemistry Challenges, to Biosensing Opportunities”.
\AS
04 December 2020
Welcome our new PhD candidate Najiya to the ESMP. Najiya will be working on "Physics meet Biology " scheme, specifically on research in liquid crystal elastomers for artificial vasculature for sustaining organoid growth.
\AS
31 May 2020
Many congratulations to Catherine and Jan for the new article "
Disruption of electrospinning due to water condensation into the Taylor cone", published in
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. This paper has open access.
\AS
17 October 2019
Congratulations to Larry! Who recently defended his Ph.D thesis on
"Liquid Metals and Liquid Crystals Subject to Flow: From Fundamental Fluid Physics to Functional Fibers"
\AS
03 September 2019
Congratulations to Anjali, Jampani, and Jan on their new article published in Langmuir: "
Realignment of liquid crystal shells driven by temperature-dependent surfactant solubility"This is the study of nematic LC shells stabilized by temperature responsive surfactant. Study shows how one can change the alignment of LC just by varying the temperature. Click
here for the full article.
\AS
28 June 2019
Our Ph.D student Anjali Sharma was featured on FNR's Spotlight on Young Researchers blog! :D
Anjali works on forming liquid crystal shells and she works on trying to stabilize them using different surfactants and polymers.
Anjali and the team (Jampani, Nikolay and Jan from our group) + others from Prof. Ralf Stannarius's group in Magdeburg, Germany, observed LC shell behavior in a micro gravity environment made possible through several parabolic flights initiated in a plane provided by the German Aerospace Center (
DLR)
Read about & see her experience here on the FNR's site:
Spotlight on Young Researchers: Anjali Sharma
Anjali’s PhD is funded by the FNR’s PRIDE programme in the framework of the Doctoral Training Unit (DTU) MASSENA, which has the goal to improve the understanding and the performance of materials used in sensing and energy harvesting
\CGR\
19 September 2018
Congratulations to Anjali & Jan on the new publication in Liquid Crystals: "Influence of head group and chain length of surfactants used for stabilising liquid crystal shells"
This is the systematic study of the effect of different surfactants on Nematic LC shell, in terms of stability and alignment.
/AS/
13 September 2018
. .
Welcome to our new post-doc Rijeesh (left) and phd Nikolay (right) who have joined our team. Rijeesh will be working on making cholesteric LC shells for reflector tags. While Nikolay will aim to generate tube-shaped liquid crystal elastomer actuators for biomedical applications.
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15 April 2015
We welcome Camila Honorato as a member of our group! She will be working as a doctoral candidate in the MISONANCE project, carried out in collaboration with the team of Prof. Tanja Schilling at PhyMS, UL. Camila will study the self-assembly of water-suspended cellulose nanocrystals into lyotropic liquid crystal phases, and how this self-assembly competes with the tendency of electrostatically charged nanorod suspensions to arrest into a jammed state. She will interact closely with Anja Kuhnold from Prof. Schilling's group, who is doing theory and computer modeling corresponding to Camila's experiments.
15 January 2015
It is with great pleasure that we welcome our new Ph.D. candidate, Catherine Reyes, coming from Cornell University where she carried out her Master studies with Prof. Margaret Frey. Catherine should have arrived already in September but the paper work for allowing a US citizen and Cornell graduate to start as Ph.D. candidate in Luxembourg turned out to be beyond our wildest imagination… Anyway, she is finally here and she will be working full time on liquid crystal-functionalized electrospun fibers for wearable technology.
