American Physical Society March Meeting 2013

This week, our group went to Baltimore, Maryland to give a number of talks at the APS March Meeting 2013, the national conference for Condensed Matter Physics attended by almost 10,000 physicists.

Chris Burke talked about his recent work on “Identifying molecular features that maximize the second hyperpolarizability”  that has recently been submitted to ArXiV.

Badel Mbanga spoke about some very recent work on looking at  “Arrested of coalescence of emulsion droplets of arbitrary size”. This is the first report of work from our recent collaboration with Patrick Spicer of UNSW and Marco Caggioni of P&G. Our collaborator Don Blair followed Badel’s talk with a report of our joint work in this interesting field “The role of curvature in the jamming of hard spheres on the surface of a spheroid”.

Group PI Tim Atherton, in his talk “Competition of Elasticity and Flexoelectricity for bistable alignment of nematics on patterned substrates” spoke about the results of his calculations looking at how flexoelectricity can affect the alignment of liquid crystals on patterned surface. This work came out in Physical Review E late last year.

We’re also delighted to report that our friends in the Staii lab here at Tufts spoke about some of our collaborative work in two talks: “Role of biomechanical cues on neuronal growth on asymmetric textured surfaces” given by Cristian Staii and “Temporally Resolved Axonal Growth Rates: A Stochastic Study”, which was given by one of our amazing undergraduate researchers Dan Rizzo.

Thanks to the APS and Baltimore for hosting the meeting.