Soft Matter – eng

Soft matter can be considered as a newly-emerged discipline concerned with the study of a range of systems that fall between simple liquids and solids. Despite the fact that chemists, biologists and physicists have been working in this field for many years, the term “soft matter” earned widespread acceptance only after being popularized by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes in his 1991 Nobel Physics Prize speech.

Soft matter plays a key role in our everyday life considering that living cells and tissues are it, and so are numerous things we routinely use: paint, soap, milk, shampoo, butter, shaving foam, ice-cream, and so on. This research field provides a unique platform to study, understand and design a large class of molecular materials, such as polymers, thermotropic liquid crystals, micellar solutions, microemulsions and colloidal suspensions, also including biological materials like biomacromolecules, membranes or vesicles. The richness of this emerging discipline relies on the strong overlap between the fields of polymer science, physical chemistry, and biology in two key areas: self-organization and self-assembly.

In short, our research is geared towards a multidisciplinary approach incorporating elements from organic chemistry, polymer science, biophysics, materials engineering and physical chemistry. The main research interests of the lab are: macromolecular assembly, soft nanotechnology, responsive supra- and macromolecular materials, molecular recognition-directed assembly of functional biointerfaces and transport phenomena in macromolecular interfacial architectures.