News

Unilever PLC have agreed to provide core funding for continuation of the Edwards Symposium Series after the very successful inaugural event in September 2016. Thanks to their generosity, Edwards Symposia will now be held annually for the next five years. Their format combines leading edge academic presentations with a forum for industrial participants to present research challenges that can inspire future academic research.

The second Edwards Symposium will be held 6-8 September 2017:

http://www.turing-gateway.cam.ac.uk/tgmw44.shtml

Postdocs and PhD students with interests in soft matter research are invited to join the Edwards Centre by auto-enrolling to the following mailing list:

https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/ucam-ecsm-affiliated

You will be required to confirm membership via email but membership is open to all within Cambridge. You can dis-enroll at any time. This list will be used to inform you of ECSM events.

Academics or PI's (those who hold their own grant funding, e.g. in the form of a Fellowship) should instead join the following list:

https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/ucam-ecsm-researchstaff

The Edwards Centre now has over 40 academic PIs including permanent academics and independent research fellows. It has a further 80+ members among postdoctoral staff and PhD students across the University. Members are drawn from at least 6 different departments: Physics, Chemistry, Applied Maths, Chemical Engineering, Engineering, Materials Science and Metallurgy.

The Second Edwards Symposium, held 6-8 September, attracted well over 100 participants from at least 10 different countries. This included around 20 participants from industrial or KT organizations. There were sessions on New Functional Materials, Ionic Effects in Soft and Colloidal Materials, Soft Biomatter and Soft Matter Under Flow -- alongside 6 Industrial Challenge presentations and 20 elevator pitches by early-career poster presenters.

An Industrial Icebreaker event will be held on Wednesday 11 October, 11am -- 4pm. The purpose is to explore opportunities for new cooperative interactions between Cambridge academics and either existing or new industrial partners.

To register, visit: http://www.turing-gateway.cam.ac.uk/node/5955

The Edwards Centre invites nominations from a new category of visiting membership to be known as Edwards Fellows. This category is reserved for highly distinguished soft matter scientists who intend to visit the University for at least one month. Although Edwards Fellowships do not carry financial support, it is hoped that the extra prestige of the Edwards Fellowship will help attract senior visitors to Cambridge and strengthen their case for funding from other channels. These awards should also improve visibility of the Edwards Centre and draw attention to the extremely high calibre of visitors that our members regularly attract. 

Nominations for Edwards Fellowships, comprising the visitor's name, planned dates of visit, and a brief CV or link to a wikipedia, google scholar or home page, should be sent by the host to Erika Eiser <ee247@cam.ac.uk> and will then be considered by a small panel. This should be done well in advance of the visit if at all possible. 

The expected level of distinction for Edwards Fellows corresponds roughly to holders of a named Chair in the USA, an Advanced Grant from the ERC, or a major prize from one of the learned societies.

The third Edwards Centre mini-conference, bringing together soft matter researchers from across the university, will be held on Monday 15 January at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Over 60 participants are expected.

Half day symposium, taking place in Chemistry, 2 February 2018.

Click here to see event.

Pillar of the physical chemistry scientific community and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of California at  Berkeley. Spanning a career that changed the course of the field of physical chemistry, not just once but several times, he is credited with crafting the modern language and concepts for describing structure and dynamics of condensed matter, especially complex systems with disorder and heterogeneity, such as liquids, glasses and biological assemblies.

Speakers:
Dr Céline Merlet
Professor Christoph Dellago
Professor Iris Antes
Professor Juan P. Garrahan
Dr Lester Hedges
Professor Pieter Rein ten Wolde
Professor Berend Smit
Dr Benjamin Rotenberg
Professor Tuomas Knowles
Dr Ulf Pedersen

Research Groups in the Physics, Chemistry & Melville laboratories have discovered a new synthesis route to make uniform 'raspberry'-like colloids in a single step reaction. They show that aqueous suspensions of these nano-particles remain stable over a large range of ionic strengths, defying DLVO theory.

This collaborative research has been now published in Nature Communications.

https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/news/researchers-discover-unexpected-stability-“raspberry”-colloids

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05560-3

Paper

Supporting information