2019

The laboratory of Soft and Living Materials wishes you happy holidays!

Guido, Maria and Qin presented posters at Materials Day, the symposium organized by the Materials Department of ETH Zürich every two years.

We have a new lab logo!  

Congrats Maria!  Maria was awarded the "Best Presentation" prize at the Bionspired Materials conference in Monte Verità, Switzerland.

Andrea was awarded the Strategic Fellowship for Research in Japan. The grant is provided by the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science, which supplies funding for foreign scientists to pursue their research in Japan.

Congrats Stefanie!  Stefanie has been awarded an Ambizione grant from the SNSF for the proposal titled "Multi-scale modelling of size effects in the fracture of soft solids."

Our laboratory was involved in the organization of the exhibition "Nanostructures show their true colours" for European Heritage Days 2019, aimed at showing to the public how living creatures exploit structure to create colour.

Guido has been elected president of the Swiss Young Chemists’ Association.

The laboratory went on a lab outing playing Hornussen, a traditional sport that is played in the Swiss countryside. 

Alex, Eric, Guido and Sai attended the NCCR Bio-Inspired Materials Annual Center Conference (ACC) this Monday and Tuesday in Charmey, Switzerland.

The second lab scavenger hunt happened this Saturday.

Guido and Tom participated to two conferences. In particular, Tom was at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Soft Condensed Matter Physics, close to Boston, USA. Guido is at the Conference on Molecular Systems Engineering (ICMSE 2019) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Eric and Rob gave talks while visiting laboratories in the US and Germany.

Katie and Sai’s paper on phase separation in elastic networks is now on the arXiv. 

Several students will work in our lab throughout summer, as they will be involved in bachelor theses, master projects and master theses. 

Dominic won the 3rd place prize for "Best image" at the MaP Symposium 2019, with a picture of calcium carbonate crystals.

Frank Scheffold visited our lab, as well as other groups in the ETH Materials Department, on June 26th. He collaborates with us on bio-inspired optical materials as part of an NCCR Bio-Inspired Materials project.

Three new students (Greta, Maddalena and Sabrina) joined our lab and will stay with us until the end of the summer. 

The Soft and Living Materials annual lab retreat happened last weekend! We went to Melchtal, in the Swiss Alps, to discuss the group mission and how we are doing as a lab. 

Eric gave a keynote lecture at the International Soft Matter Conference 2019 in Edinburgh with the title "Phase-separation in an elastic matrix: from living cells to synthetic materials".