Theme 4: Soft Materials

Soft materials and complex fluids are ubiquitous not only in biology, but also in industrial arenas as diverse as oil recovery, food technology, cosmetics and personal care products, electronic devices, and biotechnologies, such as microfluidics and targeted drug delivery.

Soft materials characteristically exhibit hierarchical structures organized on multiple length-scales, which emerge from molecular and supra-molecular self-assembly. The study of how their macroscopic materials properties emerge as a consequence of the properties and interactions of their constituent molecules promises not only to illuminate Nature's design rules but to inform us in the design of our own smart soft materials: structure-function understanding par-excellence.

Infrastructure and capability

The spatial and temporal richness of these hierarchical architectures necessitates the use of varied experimental techniques to address organizational phenomena and dynamics across many orders of magnitude. It is the complementary nature of the available techniques, in addition to theoretical capability, and relevant expertise in the gamut of soft matter systems including emulsions, foams, liquid crystals, polymer and biopolymer solutions and gels, that is the strength of the Theme.