| LCI News |
Jan.
12,
2005 Dr. Ivan Smalyukh, a Liquid Crystal Institute research associate in Professor Oleg Lavrentovich’s group, received an Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) Fellowship in the amount of $20,000. The fellowship will run from July 2005 through June 2006, with the possibility of a renewal for a second year. To be considered for the fellowship, Smalyukh wrote a proposal entitled “Three-dimensional structures and defects in liquid crystalline biopolymers”. The primary goal of his project is to investigate defect structures and pattern formation in biological liquid crystalline biopolymers such as DNA and F-actin, and examine such phenomena in the context of biological function. In order to engage the research of a broad class of problems at the interface of liquid crystal physics and biology, researchers took advantage of the ICAM infrastructure by establishing a new multi-disciplinary collaboration between two ICAM branches (Kent State University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). This collaboration will also enrich Dr. Smalyukh’s training in biophysics which is essential for him to pursue an academic career at the interface of physics and biology. The Fellowship will enable collaboration between Prof. Gerard C.L. Wong’s group from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Prof. Oleg Lavrentovich’s group at the Liquid Crystal Institute, to apply the technique of Fluorescence Confocal Polarizing Microscopy to the studies of biological systems with liquid crystal order. The partnership will benefit researchers at both universities, as it will offer LCI researchers an opportunity to work with the systems of biological significance (F-actin, DNA, etc.) and the University of Illinois researchers with the advanced techniques in the studies of orientational order as well as the expertise in complex director patterns. Smalyukh will present his work at ICAM Annual Meetings held during the tenure of the fellowship, and may be invited to present seminars on his research at other ICAM branches. He will submit a scientific progress report at the end of the first year and a final report at the end of the granting period. As an ICAM Fellow he is expected to play an active role in public outreach, through activities such as public lectures, review articles, and written perspectives on his research area on the ICAM web site. Kent State University, under the direction of Physics Professor Khandker Quader, recently joined the international research network, the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM). Conceived at a Los Alamos workshop in December, 1998, ICAM became a distributed "Institute without Walls" that takes its experiment-driven program of research collaborations and networks linking individual scientists across disciplines and institutions, as stated on its Web page http://icam.lanl.gov/icam_ucop.html. In July, 2002, ICAM became a Multi-campus Research Program, with Los Alamos National Laboratory as the lead campus; Kent State University is one of the branches. For information about the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter
see the web page: ### |