Dear colleagues,
I hope that you enjoyed the International Liquid Crystal Conference in Kent as much as I did, despite the relatively high costs for travelling that apparently most participants had to incur. In any case, I think that it was an interesting conference with a colourful mix of topics. A detailed conference report will appear in Liquid Crystals Today in due time. Talking about conferences, I would like to advertise the following upcoming meetings, which may well be of interest to a larger part of the ILCS membership and the liquid crystal community.
The next meeting is certainly of interest to the Asian members, the 3rd Asian Conference on Liquid Crystals, to be held at the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, from 13 to 15 February 2017 and chaired by Prof. Wei Lee. Web: http://aclc2017.conf.tw/
This is followed by the European Conference on Liquid Crystals which is taking place at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, chaired by Prof. Khokhlov from 25 to 30 June 2017. Web: http://eclc2017.msu.ru
Later that year, the Optics of Liquid Crystals conference will be chaired by Prof. Figueiredo Neto from 24 to 29 September 2017 at the Casa Grande Hotel Resort in Guaruja, Brazil. Web: http://www.fig.if.usp.br/~olc/
At last, there is the International Conference on Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals to be held in Hong Kong from 3 to8 December 2017, chaired by Prof. Kwok and Prof. Chigrinov. Web: http://flc16.ust.hk
Registration and websites are largely open for the conferences, so please have a look at their websites.
On a completely different note, I would like to announce that Flynn Castles has unfortunately resigned from writing the Research News contribution for Liquid Crystals Today. I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank him very much for his hard work in bringing us the news about outstanding papers and summarising their content. And I do like to point out that his section was one of the most popular and most widely read of the journal.
I am also very glad to say that I already found a replacement for Flynn, Mamatha Nagaraj from the University of Leed, UK, who will start contributing to Liquid Crystals Today from the next issue onward. So, we will only have to do for one issue without our Research News section.
Finally, I would already now informally invite expressions of interest to host the ILCC2020. If you are interested in organising this most important and largest meeting in our field, please do contact Peter Collings at [email protected] to discuss further. A formal invitation for submissions will be posted in due time.
Since this is the last issue of Liquid Crystals Today for the year 2016, I would like to already take the opportunity to wish all our readers a peaceful and relaxing holiday season, despite the fact that it still looks very far away. And of course I wish everybody all the best for the coming new year and a successful 2017.