Professor Daan Frenkel Visit Softmatter Group

May 30-31, at the invitation of the researcher Liangbin Li and associate researcher Ningdong Huang of the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, Boltzmann Medal winner, 2016 Boltzmann Medalist and Professor Daan Frenkel from the Department of Chemistry of Cambridge University visited University of Science and Technology of China. On May 31st, Professor Daan Frenkel gave a "Master Forum" report titled "The Puzzle of self-assembly and the self-assembly of puzzles" to teachers and students of the school. The report was hosted by researcher Liangbin Li. Though at the Dragon Boat Festival, it can not stop the enthusiasm of the students. All seats were occupied in 2# lecture hall of National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.

In the report, Daan Frenkel talked about the interesting self-assembly behavior and vividly presented the magical self-assembly behavior. In a humorous manner, the role of statistical physics and thermodynamics law in self-assembly behavior was discussed. There is no complicated mathematical derivation in this report, but more profound physical understanding. Prof. Daan Frenkel took his 1000 pieces of puzzles as an example to introduce his "fight" with self-assembly and introduced systematic in-depth simulation research work on self-assembly.

After the report, students and teachers discussed with Professor Daan Frenkel about the content of the report and their own research.

Professor Daan Frenkel is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign academician of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, a foreign academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign academician of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Frenkel was born in the Netherlands in 1948 and he graduated from the University of Amsterdam. From 1987 to 2007, he conducted research at the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Physics (AFOLM) in the Netherlands. Since 2007, he has served as a faculty member at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge and served as Professor of Chemistry and head of Chemistry Department. Professor Frenkel's main research area is computational physical chemistry. He has made significant contributions in understanding the dynamics, self-assembly, and phase behavior of soft matter (complex macromolecule system, colloid, and biomolecular system) using computational simulations and won numerous international awards. Based on his innovative work on the use of large-scale computational methods in the field of condensed matter physics for soft matter, Professor Frenkel received the most important prize in the field of statistical mechanics, the Boltzmann Medal of the International Federation of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) in 2016.