Liquid Crystals Gordon Research Conference "Soft Order and Topology Motives in Biomedicine, Nanoscience, Cosmology, Living Matter and Emergent Industries"

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This proposal seeks support for the 2019 Gordon Conference on Liquid Crystals to be held 7-12 July 2019 at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH, USA. The associated Gordon Research Seminar will take place on the weekend before, 6-7 July 2019. It is anticipated that many of the students attending the GRS will stay on for the GRC meeting. The GRS/GRC will bring together a diverse interdisciplinary community of researchers working at the frontiers of liquid crystal science and technology, broadly defined. The unique interaction of liquid crystals with light, and especially their response to laser beams, allows one to control their structure and opens numerous possibilities for technological applications. Liquid crystals composed of - or doped with - nano-sized particles are of a great interest for emerging new applications such as the tunable and frequency selective negative index media. The anticipated new technological developments are closely related to many interesting emerging problems in basic science of liquid crystals that attract great interest. Being at the nexus of materials science, biology, soft condensed matter physics, chemistry, optics, and photonics, the conference theme is inherently interdisciplinary.The conference focus will be on recent advances at the interface between soft condensed matter physics, biomaterials, biotechnology and optics that promise to open conceptually novel directions of research. The speakers will be specifically asked to emphasize the open/emerging questions and unsolved problems. Understanding the underlying physics, chemistry, and biology of systems that possess liquid crystallinity will be emphasized. The program will include talks that address these topics through experiment, theory and simulation, and it will also integrate fundamental and applied perspectives. The broader impacts of this conference lay in its structure. The conference will take the form of a summit, bringing together prominent scientists as well as students and postdoctoral fellows. The conference will provide ample opportunities to foster networking between students and junior researchers, to make connections with many of the leading scientists from a wide variety of fields, and to establish exciting new collaborations. Among invited participants at the GRS and GRC are University Professors, Company CEOs, Journal Editors (e.g. from Nature Communications), Program Managers from US funding agencies (NSF, DOD and DOE), Group Leaders at national laboratories, etc. Communications with these individuals in the research area of liquid crystals will broaden the perspectives of postdocs and students for future career options that they have for future career options.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.