Community Building in Soft Matter

Weitz and Lewis (Harvard MRSEC) hosted 105th New England Complex Fluids (NECF) workshop in December at Harvard. NECF celebrated over twenty-five years of bringing together the soft matter community across the region. There were over 165 participants and 55 researcher soundbites which highlighted recent advances in soft matter. The invited speakers (bottom) featured former Center alumni Jacinta Conrad (University of Houston) and Chinedum Osuji (University of Pennsylvania) as well as Monica Olvera de la Cruz (Northwestern University) and Nick Carroll (University of New Mexico)—members of the MRSEC and PREM External Advisory Boards, respectively. The keynote lecture was given by Shmuel Rubinstein (Hebrew University), an international collaborator with the MRSEC. The NECF workshop is timed with the annual Materials Research Society (MRS) Boston fall meeting to attract scientists from national laboratories, industrial and international researchers, and academia.