Rideal Lecture - Colloids: Simple Yet Complex
20 Feb 2017
The Sir Eric Rideal Lecture honours an individual who has made a sustained and distinguished contribution to colloid and interface science in the UK and a one-day scientific meeting is organised around the winner. This year’s one-day symposium will feature six invited lectures by colleagues and former group members and will conclude with Professor Daan Frenkel, the award recipient, presenting the Rideal lecture.
You can book a place at the symposium below.
Professor Willem Kegel, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Complex structures formed by simple colloids;
Prof Willem Kegel is Professor of Physical Chemistry at Utrecht University. His research is mainly focused on colloids, developing and studying new colloidal model systems in which both the geometry of the colloids and the orientation dependent interactions between them can be tuned. His goal is to pin down the essential properties of these types of building blocks in the form of well-defined patchy colloids.
Dr Richard Sear, University of Surrey, UK
The Competition Between Glycine Crystal Polymorphs: a story of the tortoise and the hare
Dr Sear is a computational physicist working in the field of soft matter physics, mainly on crystallisation and on biological physics. He currently leads the Department of Physics' Soft Matter group and teaches modules ranging from maths for physicists to biological physics. His research often focuses on the nucleation of crystals, as well as processes inside living cells, mostly diffusion and transport inside cells and on the spatial organisation of cells.
Dr Zorana Zeravcic, ESPCI, Paris, France
Multicomponent Self-assembly
Dr Zeravcic’s thesis, Vibrations in Materials with Granularity, won the CJ Kok Prize for the best thesis of 2010 at the University of Leiden, where she studied the jamming scenarios in packings of ellipsoids with Professors Sidney Nagel and Andrea Liu. At Ledien, she also studied, in collaboration with Professor Detlef Lohse, the collective dynamics of bubbles in a liquid that are excited by ultrasound. She received the prestigious George F Carrier fellowship at Harvard, where she developed her research into the directed self-assembly of complex systems, and is now an Associate Professor at the ESPCI.
Professor Roel Dullens, University of Oxford, UK
Two-dimensional melting of colloidal hard spheres
Prof Dullens heads up the Dullens Group at University of Oxford, which focuses on colloidal suspensions, including topics such as synthesis and characterisation of colloidal model systems, grain boundaries in colloidal crystals, jamming and crystallisation in frustrated systems, optical tweezers in colloidal systems, and dynamics in confinement.
Dr Erika Eiser, University of Cambridge, UK
Micro-rheology in DNA Hydrogels
Dr Eiser is the Reader in Soft Matter Physics and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. Her research group develops new materials using self-assembly and controlled aggregation processes. In particular, it uses DNA functionalised colloids to design porous gels for applications in photonics and new battery materials. The interdisciplinary research combines experimental physics, physical chemistry, and biochemistry, as well as simulations.
Dr Rosalind Allen, University of Edinburgh, UK
Polymer-mediated bacterial aggregation
Dr Allen is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and the Reader in Biological, as well as a member of SynthSys, Edinburgh's Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology. Her research focuses on biological and soft condensed matter physics, using simulations, theory and experiments, particularly microbe-environment interactions. She is especially interested in how bacterial populations are inhibited by, and evolve resistance to, antibiotics, and how nutrient-cycling microbial ecosystems establish themselves and maintain their function.
Professor Daan Frenkel, University of Cambridge, UK
Rideal Lecture - Colloids: simple yet complex
Prof Frenkel, the recipient of this year’s Rideal Medal, researches molecular simulations in the area of soft and biological matter. He predicts the stability and rate of formation of self-assembling structures and materials. Such studies are relevant for the design of novel materials and for the understanding of the physical properties of existing self-assembled structures.
Daan has previously received many honours and was elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (1998), Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2006), Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2008), and Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA, 2016). He visited the UK in 1999 as the Bourke lecturer of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and was awarded their Soft Matter & Biophysical Chemistry Award in 2010.
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