Soft Matter PhD-students Lunch meetings

During the spring and autumn of 2009 we will organize “The Soft Matter PhD students lunch meetings”. The first meeting will be held on the 28th of January 12-13 at “Hyllan”. This is next to the main restaurant at campus, if you don´t know how to get there please let us know or ask a colleague.

The purpose of these meetings is to create connections between students within the graduate school. Hopefully this will lead to collaborations between departments and that we all realize that many of us work on similar problems. What we should do during the meetings is very much up to the participants. We can present our own research, invite lectures that we find interesting (from academia as well as industry), arrange discussions, and so on. The first meeting will just be an opportunity for us to meet and discuss what we want to do and how it should be arranged.

According to the wishes of the participants of the first lunch meeting, the idea is to invite people from the industry, academic top-researchers as well as career/leadership coaches. Furthermore, it's probably of everyone's interest to become acquainted with the different projects conducted by the Soft Matter students, i.e. us!  This will be an unique opportunity to exchange ideas and tips with people adjacent to your own area of research.

There will be lunch seminars given every last Wednesday (usually) each month, presumably at "Hyllan". Preliminary, there will be approximately 50% seminars held by the students of Soft Matter and 50% external speeches.
 

Dates for this autumn

17th of December.

There is a limited number of seats available. If you are interested, please register by sending Anders Gunnarsson an email and specify particular requests regarding the food (vegetarian, allergies etc).

Upcoming meeting

The last lunch seminar this fall will be on the 17th of December at Hyllan. The orator will be Markus Andersson from Applied Surface Chemistry at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

He will give a short presentation of his project, Marine Paint, a research program spanning several departments at GU and Chalmers with the focus to develop and investigate new materials for marine paint applications.

Hope to see you there!

The organizing committee
Markus Andersson and Anders Gunnarsson

Previous meetings

18th of November 

The orator will be Maria Gröndahl, CTO at the Chalmers spin-off company, Xylophane AB.

Abstract:
Xylophane AB is a start-up company, which is developing a renewable barrier material for packaging. The material is a barrier to oxygen, grease and aroma and can be used to extend shelf life of oxygen sensitive, greasy and aromatic products. Maria Gröndahl, one of the founders of the company, will talk about the journey from research project to start-up company.

21st of October

The orator will be PhD student Jonas Nordström from the Condensed Matter Physics group:

The Condensed Matter Physics group at the Department of Applied Physics conducts research in a variety of different areas. Main focus of the group is on ion conducting materials and relaxation dynamics in colloidal systems and glasforming liquids.

My goal with this short presentation is to give an overview of the research going on at the group and to discuss the experimental techniques that we master in an effort to promote more collaboration between the "soft" groups at Chalmers.

23rd of September

Next lunch seminar will be on the 23rd of September at Hyllan. The orator will be Rolf Andersson from SCA Hygiene products who will talk about "research through open innovation".

29th of April

The orators will be professor Fredrik Höök and Soft Matter PhD student Magnus Jonsson from Biological Physics, Chalmers. This will be an unique opportunity to learn more about the ongoing activities at Biological Physics with focus on biointerfaces and ultrasensitive surface-based biosensors.

25th of Mars

The orator of the upcoming meeting will be assistent professor Hans Wyss from TU Eindhoven. His experimental work uses techniques such as rheology and microrheology, light scattering, microfluidics, multi- particle tracking, or confocal microscopy to study the mechanics, the dynamics and the structure of soft materials.

26th of February

The orator our first meeting will be assistent professor Martin Andersson from applied surface chemistry, founder of Promimic, a Chalmers innovation company. You will gain insight on conducting research in a company and the differences compared with academia. Furthermore you will learn of the possibilities as well as challenges when it comes to starting up new companies based on research ideas.