Materials Day 2015 – Soft Materials

Introduction

Materials Day

The Symposium "Materials Day" is organized biannually by the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich to bring together faculty, researchers and students with representatives from industry and the media.

The Materials Day offers scientific information and opportunities for interaction among the materials community. It is organized as a full day symposium including oral presentations and poster sessions.

The 2015 Materials Day "Soft Materials" aims at giving an overview on new soft materials and their fabrication using a variety of building blocks, from nanoparticles to polymeric systems. During the symposium you will be introduced to new experimental techniques and to strategies to create novel materials with unprecedented mechanical and optical properties. We are very happy to  have several internationally renowned speakers who will guide us through a journey in which the breadth and importance of this field will be highlighted.

Department of Materials

The objectives of the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich are to conduct world-class materials research and to educate materials scientists and engineers at the highest level.

In both research and education, the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich is committed to the idea of materials science spanning many orders of magnitude in size scale, from atoms to products, and also stretching from highly fundamental studies to those with direct technological implications.

Competence Center for Materials and Processes

The competence center "Materials and Processes" is a network of scientists devoted to the development and understanding of new materials and processes at ETH Zurich. It promotes research and education as well as the dialogue between academia and external stakeholders, such as industry or society in this field.

Without new materials and (nano- and micro)processes, many of the developments that we take for granted – telecommunications, sophisticated medicine, advanced building structures, functional food, modern cars, trains and airplanes, and computers – would not exist. In order to address the complexity of the current pressing challenges, interdisciplinary collaboration is essential. The competence center «Materials and Processes» includes researchers from over seventy groups in eleven departments, synergistically combining a very broad expertise.

The competence center "Materials and Processes" was founded in October 2013 as a merger of the former Materials Research Center (MRC) and Micro and Nano Science Platform (MNSP).