Soft matter provides the basis of a wide range of consumer products (from skin creams to salad
dressings), yet our ability to engineer dynamic interfacial phenomena that underlie the structure
and function of many of these products remains primitive. This presentation will explore how liquid
crystalline oils can provide new methods to study non-equilibrium states of oil-water interfaces
and new designs of functional soft matter. A first example will describe surfactant-driven flows
at interfaces of liquid crystals, revealing how liquid crystals enable optical characterization of
the influence of surfactants on the mobility of oil-water interfaces and provide facile methods to
quantify dynamic properties of surfactants at interfaces. A second example will address the finding
that incubation of aqueous dispersions of phospholipid vesicles (and extracellular vesicles shed
by mammalian cells) against interfaces of liquid crystals triggers spatially localized (micrometerscale)
and transient (sub-second) flashes of light to be transmitted through the liquid crystal.
Analysis of the spatio-temporal response of the liquid crystal supports our proposal that each
optical “blinking” event results from collision of a single vesicle with the liquid crystal interface. A
final example will explore the interactions of motile bacteria with the interfaces of liquid crystals,
illustrating how non-equilibrium interfacial states of liquid crystals can give rise to new classes of
self-regulating soft materials that pass mechanical, chemical and optical information to and from
living biological systems.
NICHOLAS L. ABBOTT received a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical
Engineering) from University of Adelaide, Australia in 1985, and a PhD in
Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991.
He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department of Harvard
University from 1991-1993. His initial academic appointment was at University
of California-Davis. He moved to the Department of Chemical and Biological
Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998 and served as
Chairman of the department (2009 to 2012) and Director of the Wisconsin
Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (2012 to 2018). In 2018,
he joined Cornell University as the Tisch University Professor in the School
of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. His research accomplishments
revolve around studies of colloidal and interfacial phenomena, which have
been acknowledged by the ACS Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry
and the Alpha Chi Sigma Award of AIChE. He is a member of the National
Academy of Engineering, and serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Current Opinion
in Colloid and Interface Science.
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