Soft Matter Theory at APS 2012

This year’s American Physical Society March Meeting, the huge national meeting of condensed matter physicists, was held in the Soft Matter Theory Group’s home town of Boston, MA.

Tim Atherton gave a presentation “Multistable alignment of nematic liquid crystals on patterned surfaces” about his work on using surfaces to control the self-assembly and alignment of liquid crystals for potential display applications.

Other presentations concerned our new collaboration with Cristian Staii‘s biophysics group: undergraduate researcher Sawyer Bernath, co-mentored by Atherton and Staii, gave a poster “Simulating Growth Dynamics of Neurons on Substrates” while postdoctoral scholar James White gave a talk “A Quantitative Analysis of Axonal Growth and Connectivity in Cortical Neurons”.