Lecture Theatre A/B, James Clerk Maxwell Building, Kings Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD
9:00 Welcome, Philip Best, Head of School of Physics and Astronomy
9:10 Mike Cates
9.40 Dave Fairhurst
10.10 John Hone
10.40 Laurence Wilson
11.10 Tea and coffee
11.40 Laura Starrs
12.10 Lucio Isa
12.40 Patrick Warren
13.10 Lunch
14.00 Peter Pusey
14.30 Veronica McKinny
15.00 Jill Burke
15.30 Tea and coffee
16.00 Michael Fuller
16.30 Rebecca Poon
17.00 Wilson Poon
19.30 Dinner South Hall, Pollock Estate, 18 Holyrood Park Rd
Session 1
Mike Cates: the third founder of the Soft Matter group, now Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at The University of Cambridge, known for his theoretical work on a wide range of soft matter systems.
Colloid science and biophysics: The Poonian approach.
Over his career Wilson Poon has been instrumental in a paradigm shift in the study of colloidal and biological materials. The pre-1992 paradigm was a chemistry-centric viewpoint -- whose main target was to estimate and explain the interactions between mesoscopic entities such as colloidal particles. This has evolved into a physics-centric view, in which the main target is to understand how, in general, those interactions control complex, emergent behaviour at many-body level. The Poonian approach has been pivotal to understanding arrest, aggregation and rheology in traditional colloids, and also has made important inroads into many biophysical problems. This talk will survey some of its successes, and speculate on future directions.
David Fairhurst one of Wilson's first PhD students and now a colleague in Edinburgh
Landscapes and Portraits: using free energy to predict behaviour.
I will start with a recap of older work on free energy landscapes in colloid-polymer systems. Then I will present more recent work on the three component Ouzo system, and question whether the free energy landscape is still a useful framework for even more complex systems, with additional components or polydispersity.
John Hone: a scientist from Syngenta and was an early industrial collaborator with Wilson and expert at solving tough commercial problems.
Jam today? Unexpected Arrested Settling in Colloidal Gels
While delayed collapse is a well-documented phenomenon in colloidal gels, some recent work on depletion flocculated organic-particle gels shows that, on rare occasions, serum formation can be arrested before restarting. It will also be shown that systematically changing the particles in the same composition can also alter the settling behaviour.
Laurence Wilson: another of Wilson's PhD students, now Senior Lecturer at the University of York and pioneer of Differential Dynamic Microscopy to measure bacterial motility and particle sizing.
Life in real and reciprocal space
I'll discuss how imaging techniques from soft matter physics, including DDM and holographic microscopy, can be used to probe living systems. These methods have helped demonstrate that single-cell motility is ubiquitous even in harsh, nutrient-poor environments. I'll finish with a recent example in which high-speed imaging has been used to uncover a curious structure-function relationship in the flagella of a model algal system.
Coffee Break
Session 2
Laura Starrs: an early PhD student who kick-started the work on colloidal gels and is now Head of Transformation Business Operations at the Intellectual Property Office.
Collapse of a Physicist: life beyond academia
Ever wondered what else is out there beyond the world of academia or industrial research? I will talk about how the skills and experiences learned as a young and aspiring reasearcher studying colloid-polymer gels has led to a long and varied career in the UK civil service. Whether examining patents, negotiating international treaties, supporting legistation in parliament, managing technical teams or leading projects what I learned as a scientist (and from Wilson) has been central to success in many different roles. I hope to show what else is out there in the world of intellectual property and government service.
Lucio Isa: a PhD student of Wilson's and now Professor of Soft Materials and Interfaces at ETH Zurich, studying the fundamental properties of colloidal particles and fluid interfaces.
On how an Aristotelian syllogism (and Wilson) inspired new research directions
I academically grew up in Edinburgh under the credo of "Colloids as Big Atoms" championed by Peter Pusey, which was later complemented by Wilson's proposition of "Bacteria as (Active) Colloids". If you start from these two statements, you can see where logic takes you. In my talk, I will follow this logic argument and present some very new (for me) work on living materials inspired by soft matter principles.
Patrick Warren: seconded to Edinburgh in 1992 by Alex Lips soon after he joined Unilever and he stayed for a remarkable year.
Isothermal thermodynamics -- what if fuel cells had been invented before steam engines?
How far can thermodynamics be developed at constant temperature? Can one really do without Carnot cycles and heat engines? The answer is yes, to a certain extent: from the Kelvin-Planck statement of the second law one can at least derive the Helmholtz and Gibbs' free energies, so that much of chemical thermodynamics can be recovered. This pedagogical exercise offers a somewhat different perspective on a very old subject, and sheds new light on freighted concepts such as entropy production, fuel cell efficiency, and maximising power extraction.
LUNCH
Session 3
Peter Pusey: emeritus Professor at University of Edinburgh another founder of the Soft Matter group in Edinburgh, pioneer of dynamic light scattering and champion of using hard sphere colloids as an analogy for molecular systems.
Wilson
I will follow the three themes suggested by the organisers. First a look at Wilson's many achievements, especially his vital role in the genesis of soft matter in Edinburgh. Second, a few comments on the past, present and future of soft matter. Finally, the man himself – a force of nature!
Veronica McKinny Wilson's last PhD student and expert in blood droplets
Blood, Sweat, and Cheers
Blood is a non-newtonian fluid commonly found at crime scenes. However, much of the forensic field includes research and crime scene analysis techniques which make faulty assumptions about blood. We apply soft matter concepts and techniques to better analyse physical properties of blood relevant to crime scene analysis using gravimetrics and optical coherence tomography in order to offer recommendations for improving forensic research techniques. Additionally, the story of how my PhD project came to be and how I came to be involved in it exemplifies Wilson as both a professional and as a man.
Jill Burke: Professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures UoE, Wilson's collaborator on "Renaissance goo" project.
Renaissance Goo: Material Encounters Between History and Soft Matter Science
This talk reflects on Renaissance Goo, an interdisciplinary investigation into sixteenth-century personal care recipes that Wilson and I (a historian) worked on together. I will summarise the project’s published (and some unpublished) findings, and show how our interests converged in the ‘Beauty Sensorium’ – an art installation that started off in the Wellcome Collection and will be on its way to Barcelona next Spring. Beyond the material results, the project offered a practical education in interdisciplinary teamwork: navigating divergent vocabularies, timescales and ways of working, plus the occasional recipe that united us all in mutual bewilderment. What stood out the most, though, were the approaches that straddled the humanities/science divide: evidence-based inquiry, methodological rigour, and a willingness to pursue diverse questions wherever the material led.
TEA
Session 4
Michael Fuller: Lecturer in Science and Religion at New College, and theological collaborator with Wilson in both Church and Academy.
Theology and/of science
In addition to his work as a physicist, being celebrated in this conference, Wilson has made valuable and much-appreciated contributions to the theological field over the last few decades. This has led to significant contributions to the field of science and theology, not least to the developing field of science and religion in literature - bringing together a variety of Wilson's 'extra-curricular' passions.
Rebecca Poon: Wilson's daughter, post-doctoral researcher at University of Warwick.
Hydrodynamics is overrated (but Dads are not!)
Wilson as Dad: I offer some reflections on the (questionable?) privilege of having been supervised by my dad in many spheres – not just the scientific – over my lifetime!
I also present some of my research on cilia. These microscopic bio-filaments beat in a coordinated fashion to generate propulsion and fluid flow in a vast range of eukaryotic species. This coordination is often considered to be generated by hydrodynamic interactions, but recent research increasingly highlights the important role of other effects. Here I show that steric interactions are crucial for coordinated ciliary beating in the dense ciliary band of a marine larva, and hydrodynamic interactions are unlikely to be responsible for the observed behaviour.
Wilson Poon
From self-assembly to self-disassembly: A trajectory in the soft matter-biological physics phase space
I will outline the story of my soft-matter and biological physics research in Edinburgh over the past three and a half decades, picking out certain themes that may be of interest for planning future directions. The most prominent of these themes is the trajectory from self-assembly to self-disassembly, in particular, to the phenomenon of how living organisms die. I will end by introducing briefly a first result published earlier this year on how E. coli bacteria apparently ‘plan’ one aspect of their own post mortem life.
