Conference: 2025 Soft Condensed Matter Physics GRC/GRS

This grant will support registration fees and travel for selected participants at the 2025 Soft Matter Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) being held at Colby Sawyer College (New London, New Hampshire) 9-14 August 2025. This GRC and GRS will be relatively small gatherings of research scientists, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students who are scientifically focused on the interdisciplinary subfield of soft, squishy, deformable, and active materials.

These are important materials in our everyday world, yet scientists and engineers still do not fully understand how they work or what technology can achieve with them. Such materials can be human-made or they can be biologically-derived, and the meeting will feature presentations from scientists working on both types of systems. A major highlight of the meeting is that unpublished research will be shared among the group, which will foster rapid communication and collaboration, and allow new scientific breakthroughs to happen much faster.

The second goal of the meeting is to train the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists focused on soft matter. The meeting will have a significant number of training opportunities for students, including poster sessions for students to present their work, professional development sessions, and the opportunity to give short flash-talks. A variety of scientists from different backgrounds, and from both research-focused and teaching-focused institutions, will be present to offer advice and guidance to the students.

The scientific objectives of the GRC and GRS are several-fold. The first goal is to gather a broad set of scientists working on all aspects of soft, living, and deformable materials to discuss unpublished work, which will accelerate results, create new collaborations, and result in novel scientific and engineering knowledge generation. The second goal is to educate and train the next generation of soft matter scientists and engineers through the presentations of new results, networking discussions, and leadership opportunities, educational panels, and mentoring.

Soft Condensed Matter Physics is a highly interdisciplinary field of study undertaken by researchers in Physics, Chemistry, Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Polymer Science, and sometimes even Biology departments. One of the main objectives of this effort is to educate and mentor the next generation of soft matter scientists and engineers.

As the field has grown, the number of trainees working on soft matter questions has also grown. To train these students, the GRS will provide an extra set of presentations and mentoring sessions which is organized by trainees, for trainees. The GRC will also add a new component aimed at highlighting and training the next generation: trainee talks.

These talks will both highlight trainees' research and drive higher participation in the poster session, which is mostly presentations from graduate students and postdocs.

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.