The main page content begins here.

Scottish Soft Matter Workshop

Event description

Image courtesy of Marcel Rey and the Edinburgh Cryo FIB-SEM Facility.

Soft condensed matter encompasses a wide variety of industrial, biological and fundamental research questions regarding materials that are able to deform under mechanical stress. The complexity of these material systems arises from their duality as partially solid-like and partially fluid-like, as well as the significant role played by thermal fluctuations. These complexities require the development of analytical and computational modelling techniques, often in close collaboration with experimentalists working in industrial formulation science or biophysics.

The UK, and the North in particular, has an international reputation as being home to leaders in this endeavour. There are also multiple new hires across the field within universities throughout Scotland. This one-day workshop seeks to bring together Scottish soft matter research to establish a national sense of identity and direction. It is our intention to nucleate discussions between researchers from different locales to strengthen inter-institution collaborations. This workshop seeks to inform attendees about the breadth of ongoing research activities and Scottish interests, with invited speakers across research-intensive universities in Scotland. It will identify themes and synergies, which could be leveraged for future funding opportunities.

We warmly invite all soft matter researchers in Scotland to attend this one-day workshop.

Online participation:Zoom (pwd: s0ftMa++er)

Travel Scam! If you received emails from travellerpoint(dot)org (or another travel company), please be careful. The email asks about arrival and departure dates to Edinburgh and offers a hotel booking form where they ask for credit card details.

Please, ignore the emails and do not reply nor click on any link given by them. You can also block the domain on your email client.

Our official emails are all from this website’s domain “@ed.ac.uk” (usually, sopa.events@ed.ac.uk). Please avoid giving private information to external sources. The only official way to register for our workshops and events are advertised via this website (or indico.

All participants in HCTP activities are expected to show respect and courtesy to others throughout the duration of an event, including at social events. We draw the participants’ attention to the HCTP Code of Conduct


Timetable

See the full timetable on Indico

Sessions

12 Feb 2025 09:00
Registration

12 Feb 2025 09:50
Welcome

12 Feb 2025
Session 1

10:00—10:30
Lynn Paterson - 3D microrheology using Optical Tweezers with Integrated Multiplane Microscopy (0h30′)
10:30—11:00
Juliane Simmchen - Beyond spheres - new shapes for active matter (0h30′)
11:00—11:15
James Richards - From model suspensions to industrial challenges in chocolate and cement (0h15′)

12 Feb 2025 11:15
Coffee Break

12 Feb 2025
Session 2

11:45—12:15
Luke Davis - Control of continuous and discrete-state active matter (0h30′)
12:15—12:30
Ben Goddard - An Introduction to (Dynamic) Density Functional Theory (0h15′)
12:30—12:45
Alexander Houston - Spontaneous Oscillations in Heterogeneous Active Nematics (0h15′)
12:45—13:00
Grazia De Angelis - Developing new multiscale models leveraging ML to advance the understanding of fluid transport in polymers (0h15′)

12 Feb 2025 13:00
Lunch: Lunch

12 Feb 2025
Session 3

14:30—15:00
Marcelo Dias - Exploring Damage in Mechanical Metamaterials (0h30′)
15:00—15:30
Rebecca Walker - Structure-property relationships in ferroelectric nematogens (0h30′)
15:30—15:45
Joseph Kilbride - Growing droplets in evaporating breath figures due to the Kelvin effect (0h15′)

12 Feb 2025 15:45
Coffee Break

12 Feb 2025
Session 4

16:15—16:45
Ulrich Zachariae - Modelling biological membranes and membrane-integral proteins under realistic voltage conditions (0h30′)
16:45—17:00
Sravana Chaithanya Kanala Venkata - Vertex model with internal dissipation enables sustained flows (0h15′)

12 Feb 2025 17:00
Closing remarks and discussion

12 Feb 2025 19:30
Dinner

Scottish Soft Matter Workshop

Venues

Higgs Centre Seminar Room, JCMB (Find us on campus maps)
The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics
School of Physics and Astronomy
James Clerk Maxwell Building, 4305
Peter Guthrie Tait Road
Edinburgh
EH9 3FD
UK

Organisers

  • Halim Kusumaatmaja
    (
    • University of Edinburgh
    )
  • Apala Majumdar
    (
    • University of Strathclyde
    )
  • Tyler Shendruk
    (
    • University of Edinburgh
    )
  • Rastko Sknepnek
    (
    • University of Dundee
    )