A colloid is a mixture in which one substance consisting of microscopically dispersed insoluble particles is suspended throughout another substance. Some definitions specify that the particles must be dispersed in a liquid, while others extend the definition to include substances like aerosols and gels. The term colloidal suspension refers unambiguously to the overall mixture. A colloid has a dispersed phase and a continuous phase. The dispersed phase particles have a diameter of approximately 1 nanometre to 1 micrometre.
Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter comprising a variety of physical systems that are deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress of the magnitude of thermal fluctuations. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy, and that entropy is considered the dominant factor. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Soft materials include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, flesh, and a number of biomaterials. When soft materials interact favorably with surfaces, they become squashed without an external compressive force. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter," received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to the more complex cases found in soft matter, in particular, to the behaviors of liquid crystals and polymers.
John A. Rogers is a physical chemist and a materials scientist. He is currently the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University.
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Ludwik Leibler, born in 1952 is a Polish-born French physicist. He is Professor of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.
Michael Elmhirst Cates is a British physicist. He is the 19th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and has held this position since 1 July 2015. He was previously Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and has held a Royal Society Research Professorship since 2007.
John Douglass Ferry was a Canadian-born American chemist and biochemist noted for development of surgical products from blood plasma and for studies of the chemistry of large molecules. Along with Williams and Landel, Ferry co-authored the work on time-temperature superposition in which the now famous WLF equation first appeared. The National Academy of Sciences called Ferry "a towering figure in polymer science". The University of Wisconsin said that he was "undoubtedly the most widely recognized research pioneer in the study of motional dynamics in macromolecular systems by viscoelastic techniques".
Sharon C. Glotzer is an American scientist and "digital alchemist", the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she is also professor of materials science and engineering, professor of physics, professor of macromolecular science and engineering, and professor of applied physics. She is recognized for her contributions to the fields of soft matter and computational science, most notably on problems in assembly science and engineering, nanoscience, and the glass transition, for which the elucidation of the nature of dynamical heterogeneity in glassy liquids is of particular significance. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Journal of Colloid and Interface Science is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier. It covers research related to colloid and interface science with a particular focus on colloidal materials and nanomaterials; surfactants and soft matter; adsorption, catalysis and electrochemistry; interfacial processes, capillarity and wetting; biomaterials and nanomedicine; and novel phenomena and techniques. The editor-in-chief is Martin Malmsten. The journal was established in 1946 as Journal of Colloid Science. It obtained its current name in 1966.
Monica Olvera de la Cruz is a Mexican born, American and French soft-matter theorist who is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry, and by courtesy Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Chemical and Biological Engineering, at Northwestern University.
David J. Pine is an American physicist who has made contributions in the field of soft matter physics, including studies on colloids, polymers, surfactant systems, and granular materials. He is professor of physics in the NYU College of Arts and Science and chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Matthew V. Tirrell is an American chemical engineer. In 2011 he became the founding Pritzker Director and dean of the Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME) at the University of Chicago, in addition to serving as senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. Tirrell's research specializes in the manipulation and measurement of polymer surface properties, polyelectrolyte complexation, and biomedical nanoparticles.
Yogesh Moreshwar Joshi is an Indian chemical engineer, rheologist and the Pandit Girish & Sushma Rani Pathak Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is known for his studies on metastable soft matter and is an elected fellow of the Society of Rheology, Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, and Indian National Academy of Engineering. In 2015, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded Joshi the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for his contributions to Engineering Sciences. In 2023, he received prestigious J C Bose fellowship constituted by the Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India.
Orlin D. Velev is the INVISTA Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. He is best known for his work in soft matter, colloid science, and nanoscience.
Pierre Wiltzius is a physicist, the Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science and Susan & Bruce Worster Dean of Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Anna Christina Balazs is an American materials scientist and engineer. She currently is Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and holds the John A. Swanson Chair at the Swanson School of Engineering.
Ronald G. Larson is George G. Brown Professor of Chemical Engineering and Alfred H. White Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, where he holds joint appointments in macromolecular science and engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering. He is internationally recognized for his research contributions to the fields of polymer physics and complex fluid rheology, especially in the development of theory and computational simulations. Notably, Larson and collaborators discovered new types of viscoelastic instabilities for polymer molecules and developed predictive theories for their flow behavior. He has written numerous scientific papers and two books on these subjects, including a 1998 textbook, “The Structure and Rheology of Complex Fluids”.
John C. Crocker is an American physicist and chemical engineer. He is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
Stefan A. F. Bon is a Professor of Chemical Engineering in the department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. His research considers polymer-based colloids. He is a Fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, an elected member of the International Polymer Colloids Group (IPCG), and member of the physical Newton international fellowship committee, and served as the Royal Society of Chemistry Outreach Lecturer in 2015-2016.
Christopher William Bielawski is a distinguished professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and group leader of the Synthesis Group in the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials. His research in synthesis and polymer chemistry has resulted in more than 290 publications and multiple patents.
