Editorial

Dear colleagues,

We have now had our first large face-to-face international meeting after the pandemic, the International Liquid Crystal Conference (ILCS2022) in Lisbon, Portugal, and I have the feeling that this format was very much welcomed by all the participants. A big ‘Thank You!’ to Lena Godinho and her team, which made this conference a success and a very pleasant occasion to remember. As such, we also have one of our reports in the present issue of LC Today on this conference by one of the ILCS bursary students, Ethan Jull, from Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

And I would like to take this opportunity to remind students and their supervisors that the ILCS is providing 15 of such bursaries every year to support international conference participation of our young researchers, an opportunity which is by far not taken up every year. For more details and eligibility, please see the ILCS website at: https://www.ilcsoc.org/awards/ILCS%20Student%20Travel%20Fund/student-travel-fund.html

It is further my sad duty to inform the liquid crystal community of the passing of Professor Gerd Heppke, who for many years was a highly valued colleague at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Heinz Kitzerow, a former student of Gerd Heppke, has contributed an obituary.

After quite a while without a book review related to liquid crystals, I would like to suggest Claudio Zannoni’s monograph on simulation techniques. A very competent review of the work was provided by Mike Allen.

Last year the Optics of Liquid Crystals conference was held in Okinawa and though planned as an in-person event, Covid rules prevented this and forced the organisers to hold the meeting as a hybrid conference. For this reason a satellite workshop was organised for this year, which was mainly attended in person. A report on this meeting is also included in this issue of LC Today.

Please also have a look at the announcement of the next OLC2023, which will take place from 17.-22. September 2023 in Szczecin, Poland: https://olc2023.pl/content/welcome.

At last, as usual, there is the section of liquid crystal research news, this time indeed written for the last time by Yuan Shen, whom I would like to thank very much for taking on this task during the last two or three years.

With the best wishes,

Ingo Dierking