British Liquid Crystal Society Annual Training Workshops

We are pleased to announce that a series of British Liquid Crystal Society (BLCS) Annual Training Workshops will be organised at the University of Birmingham, being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK.

The next workshop in this series will be held at the University of Birmingham from the 8 - 10 January 2020. The three-day event will start at noon on the 8 and finish in the late afternoon of the 10 January, and will include lectures, practical training sessions and the mini-symposium. The workshop is intended for early-stage researchers (primarily PhD students, but also post-doctoral research associates and researchers in industry relatively new to the field of liquid-crystal research, irrespective of their academic disciplines) and can offer limited number of places.

The workshops are intended to provide education and training for the next generation of researchers in the highly interdisciplinary area of liquid-crystal research, highlighting its recent advances in the wider context of soft and biological matter.

The BLCS Winter Workshop was initiated more than 25 years ago and has been held successfully at the University of Hull since 1994 under the leadership of Dr Mike Hird. This long-running series of workshops is being reinvigorated with the inclusion of a mini-symposium “Liquid-Crystal Research in the 2020s”, which will discuss emerging questions and open problems in liquid-crystals research and at its interfaces.

Speakers

Confirmed speakers include:

• Dr Dwaipayan Chakrabarti
• Dr Stephen Cowling
• Prof. Cliff Jones
• Prof. Apala Majumdar
• Prof. Georg Mehl
• Prof. Nigel Mottram
• Prof. Jon Preece
• Prof. Mark R. Wilson
• Prof. Julia Yeomans

Expressions of interest in the prescribed format (see the next page) are currently invited to attend the BLCS Annual Training Workshop to be held in January 2020. Please email your expression of interest to blcs-atw@contacts.bham.ac.uk by November 15, 2019. Accepted participants will be notified in due course.

There are no registration fees for accepted participants. EPSRC funded researchers will be given priority and those funded by the Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) and the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) grants are anticipated to have access to funding to support their attendance at such a workshop. If there is no access to such funding, the expression of interest from a researcher should include a request for funding to support their attendance with an estimate.

Dwaipayan Chakrabarti and Jon Preece, on behalf of the organisers.

Expression of interest

Please download and email your expression of interest form to blcs-atw@contacts.bham.ac.uk by 22 November 2019.

BLCS expression of interest form (Word)

Programme

The three-day event will start at noon on the 8th January and finish in the late afternoon of the 10th January 2020, and will include lectures, practical training sessions and a mini-symposium.

The final programme is now available online (Word docx.).

Location

We look forward to welcoming you to the University of Birmingham for the BLCS Annual Training Workshop to be held in January 2020. The primary venue for the lectures of the workshop is the Murray Learning Centre (R28 in the Edgbaton Campus Map of the University - PDF).

The practical training session will take place in the Collaborative Teaching Laboratory (CTL) of the University. The open space in the first floor of the CTL will be used for registration and lunch.

Scientific organising committeee

• Dr Dwaipayan Chakrabarti (Co-Chair)
• Prof. Apala Majumdar (Co-Chair)
• Dr Susanne Klein
• Prof. Jon A. Preece

Sponsors and partners

British Liquid Crystal Society

EPSRC

UK Fluids Network

University of Birmingham

Contact us

For all enquiries about the BLCS Annual Training Workshops, please email at blcs-atw@contacts.bham.ac.uk.