Community building in soft matter

David Weitz (Harvard MRSEC), Jennifer Lewis (Harvard MRSEC) and Seth Fraden (Brandeis MRSEC) hosted the fall 96th and 97th New England Complex Fluids (NECF) workshops. The 97th NECF workshop in December at Harvard (right) celebrated twenty-five years of bringing together the soft matter community. There were 150 participants and 55 researcher soundbites which highlighted recent advances in soft matter. The invited speakers (bottom left) featured former Center alumni Liheng Cai (U. Virginia), Emily Davidson (Princeton), and Suliana Manley (EPFL, Switzerland) as well as Tal Cohen (MIT) and Alison Patteson (Syracuse). The NECF workshop is timed with the annual Materials Research Society (MRS) Boston fall meeting to attract international, industrial researchers, and scientists from the national laboratories.