Texas Soft Matter Meeting Comes To Austin

Graphic showcasing the event title: Texas Soft Matter Meeting, links to the event's registration webpageThe third annual Texas Soft Matter Meeting is taking place at The University of Texas at Austin Friday, August 22, 2014 from 7am-5:30pm in the Norman Hackerman Building (room 1.720); registration is now open to the public and costs $18.00.

The goal of the Texas Soft Matter Meeting is to encourage collaboration among researchers from industry and academia in Texas who work with soft materials, ranging from polymers to soft condensed matter to biomaterials. The meeting is intended to provide an interdisciplinary forum in which faculty, students, postdoctoral researchers, and professionals can exchange ideas in an informal setting.

The term Soft Matter was coined in 1970 initially as a joke but ended up sticking since it is generally used for describing all materials that are neither a solid nor a liquid. Soft Matter displays unique characteristics combing the flexibility and suppleness of fluids with the stronger interactions and sometimes long-range order otherwise seen in solids.

“There is a significant amount of soft matter research and development being performed within the State of Texas and this meeting is an unique opportunity to bring these researchers together,” said Christopher Ellison, Assistant Professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering and Texas Soft Matter Meeting organizer.

The event rotates between institutions in Texas and each year new speakers from different Texas universities are invited to talk about various subjects. Previous meetings have been held at the University of Houston and Texas A&M University. Each year contributors strive to include longer invited talks and more short contributed talks to appeal to soft materials academia from the entire state of Texas, and this year nearly 200 attendees are expected.

This year’s invited speakers and topics are:

The Role of Protein Crowding in Shaping and Organizing Cellular Membranes
Jeanne Stachowiak, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology
The University of Texas at Austin
Time: 9:33am-9:58am

Engineering via Targeted Assembly
Thomas Truskett
Department Chair
Bill L. Stanley Leadership Chair in Chemical Engineering
Les and Sherri Stuewer Endowed Professorship in Chemical Engineering
McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
Time: 10:10am-10:35am

Temperature-Responsive Polyelectrolyte Microtubes and Shells
Jodie Lutkenhaus
Assistant Professor
William and Ruth Neely Faculty Fellow
Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering
Texas A&M University
Time: 1:15pm-1:40pm

Microfluidic investigation of mechanical response of cancer cells in flow
Siva A. Vanapalli
Assistant Professor and Graduate Advisor
Department of Chemical Engineering
Texas Tech University
Time: 4:00pm-4:25pm

(See presentation abstracts on the registration webpage or a full program here)

 

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