“I kept the number of components per slide down as much as possible and tried to avoid skipping steps in explanations,” says Ebba Grönfors, PhD student at the Division of Electronic Materials, when asked to speculate on why her presentation was named best in conference at the European Conference on Liquid Crystals, held in Prague this June.
Congratulations on receiving the award, Ebba! This was also your first oral conference presentation - how does it feel?
“It felt very good. As a new PhD student, it’s quite scary to present one’s own work in front of experienced researchers who know everything about the field. I had designed much of the research I presented myself, with an approach that was a bit different from most of the other projects at the conference, so I had no idea how it would be received. This award feels like a clear signal that researchers with more experience than me believe in my idea and my ability to contribute to the field.”
In short - what was the presentation about?
“I presented a model that I have built in Matlab, which simulates ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals confined in a specific geometry. A ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal is similar to a liquid where all molecules float around in a disordered way, but the molecules are all long and polar, and they are all pointing in the same direction. You could say they make up a vector field. My model calculates the energy required to create elastic deformations in that vector field such that it satisfies a certain set of boundary conditions, and predicts where discontinuities will appear.”
What do you think was the reason your presentation was chosen for this award?
“One important part is probably that I had put a lot of time and effort into making the presentation clear and easy to follow, also for the people with less experience. I kept the number of components per slide down as much as possible and tried to avoid skipping steps in explanations. Since I presented late in the afternoon the effort was probably appreciated by most people. Another thing that probably helped is that my topic stood out a bit from the crowd, which may have made it more memorable.”
Thanks, Ebba!