About Us
The Soft Matter group consists of about 30 PhD students, postdocs, technicians and academic staff. We do experiments in recently refurbished labs with state-of-the-art kit for atomic force microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, NMR imaging and profiling, and thermo-mechanical analysis. We also carry out computations on a shared server. Our PhD students and staff have received recognition and accolades. Recent examples include an Institute of Physics (IOP) Polymer Physics Group “Best Student Paper” prize, an Institute of Materials poster prize, and an IOP Liquids and Complex Fluids Group Young Scientist Award.
We have a strong reputation for research. We regularly publish our results in leading international journals, such as Physical Review Letters and Advanced Materials, and our work has been highlighted in Science and Nature. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the majority of the Group's research was classified as either world leading or internationally excellent.
We have numerous international collaborations in Europe (e.g. in Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, San Sebastian, and Lausanne) and the USA (e.g. in Texas and North Carolina), and we regularly host visitors from labs around the world.
We organise a programme of stimulating seminars given by top scientists. Some of our recent graduates and former postdocs are now university lecturers. Others are research scientists in industry, such as Unilever and AWE.
Soft Matter group photo taken summer 2012. Back row: Alan Dalton, Jamies Mithen, Sean Gillespie, Radek Kowalczyk, Robert Gurney. Richard Sear, Marc Jones and Agyrios Georgiadis . Middle row: Violeta Doukova, Izabela Jurewicz, Harry Sansom, Andrew Brown, Joe Keddie, Peter McDonald, Dave Faux, Edurne Gonzalez Gandara, Yang Liu, and Serge Cachia. Between middle and front row: Kittiyaporn Singsumphan and Nadia Akram. Front row: Ravishanker Yadav, James Adams, Daniel Corbett, Jayesh Bhatt, Azin Fa and Nick Howlett.
Soft Matter Group in 2009
Front row, seated, left to right: James Adams (lecturer), Joe Keddie (professor), Victor Rodin (research officer), Eric Brunner, Elisabetta Canetta (now a lecturer at the University of Cardiff), Simon Pitts (now at AWE), Argyrios Georgiadis (research fellow). Back row, standing, left to right: Alan Dalton (senior lecturer), Natasha Fox (now at DSTL), Jeff Hosea (now in Malaysia), Peter McDonald (professor), Chris Mills (now a research fellow at Advanced Technology Institute, Surrey), Vinicio Gonzalez-Perez (now a research fellow at the University of Warwick), Richard Sear (senior lecturer), Akarin Intaniwet (now a lecturer at Maejo University, Thailand), Tao Wang (now a research fellow at the University of Sheffield), Carolina de las Heras Alarcon, Piyapong Asanithi (now a lecturer at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok,Thailand), André Utgenannt, Izabela Jurewicz (research fellow), Amanda Page (now at DSTL), Kittiyaporn Singsumphan, Tecla Weerakkody (now a private tutor), Che Azurahanim Che Abdullah (now a lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia), Patnarin Worajaiphon (now a lecturer at Chiang Mai University, Thailand), Dan Liu (now a research fellow at the University of Leeds).
