Boulder School 2012: Polymers in Soft and Biological Matter

July 9 - August 3, 2012

Scientific Coordinators

Alexander Grosberg, New York University
Michael Rubinstein, University of North Carolina
Eugenia Kumacheva, University of Toronto
Leo Radzihovsky, University of Colorado

Scientific image

Rainbow Mountain - Fractal art by Vicky Brango-Mitchell

Scientific image

DNA liquid crystals, Clark Lab at CU Boulder

 

Scientific image

F-actin cytoskeleton, Gardel Lab at U of Chicago

Founded by physical chemists like Flory and brought into the mainstream of theoretical physics by visionaries like de Gennes, over the last eighty years polymer physics has grown into a mature, rich, and exciting discipline. Now expanded to include also colloids, liquid crystals, interfaces, etc, polymer and soft matter physics span fundamental statistical mechanics and field theory, most advanced materials, as well as technological and biological frontiers. Nevertheless, a comprehensive exposition to fundamental concepts of polymer and soft matter science is still largely missing, neglected in most physics departments, ignored by many workers in biological realm, and underappreciated even by chemical engineers. The goal of this year’s Boulder summer school is to fill this gap and provide the physics community with a relatively comprehensive course in the fundamentals of polymer and soft matter physics with emphasis on their biological applications.

Group Photo

BSS2012 Group Image

 

Public Lectures

Thursday, July 19, 2012 at 7:00pm in Duane Physics, G1B30. David Weitz, Harvard University, "Physics of Cooking"

BSS2012 Public Lecture 1 - David Weitz

 

Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 7:00pm in Duane Physics G1B30. Paul Chaikin, New York University, "Experiments with Candies, Dice and Colloids"

BSS2012 Public Lecture 2 - Paul Chaikin

Expected lecturers and seminar speakers

Robijn Bruinsma (UCLA)
Paul Chaikin (New York)
Noel Clark (Boulder)
Daan Frenkel (Cambridge)
Alexander Grosberg (New York)
Kurt Kremer (Mainz)
Tonya Kuhl (Santa Barbara)
Eugenia Kumacheva (Toronto)
Frederick MacKintosh (Amsterdam)
L. Mahadevan (Harvard)
Tom McLeish (Durham)
Philip Pincus (Santa Barbara)
David Pine (New York)
Yitzhak Rabin (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
Michael Rubinstein (Chapel Hill)
Samuel Safran (Weizmann Institute)
Eugene Shakhnovich (Harvard)
David Weitz (Harvard)
Ekaterina Zhulina (St. Petersburg)