The BLCS Student Hardship Fund aims to support PhD students near the end of their studies whose project has been delayed by Covid-19 and who have run out or are about to run out of funding. The fund is to be considered as a last resort, to be used if no other funding support, e.g. from research councils, is available. The fund is time limited. Applications will not be possible after the end of October 2021, but the fund may be extended should the need arise.

For full details of eligibility and application process, please read the following linked document: HardshipFund-201029.

We are living in extraordinary times. Life, as we know it, has stopped and we have entered a new area, which requires new modes of thinking, behaving and communicating. As scientists, we are used to it. How could research be anything else but permanent change and adapting to new situations?

This year we will change how the medal winners are announced. Traditionally the winners have been announced at the BLCS conference. It was never a big surprise, more an open secret. A look at the conference program was enough to see who won.  Under the present circumstances we have decided to break with the tradition and disclose the list of recipients before the conference since a new date for it is not yet decided and we do not want the cliff hanger to go on for too long.

The winners  of 2020 BLCS prize winners are

All recipients will receive the medals at the upcoming conference. They cannot escape the warm handshake, the party and the talks. These are our ‘Oscars’ and we need the ‘thank you’ speeches and the glamour of the conference dinner. Let’s hope that we will not wait for too long for that.

Keep well and keep thinking outside the box.

Due to the continued spread of covid-19, we have taken the difficult decision to postpone the 2020 BLCS meeting, due to be held 6-8th April in Aberdeen.

Seeing that many universities across the Europe and the US have closed/switched to online classes, coupled with an increasing number of UK universities – including the University of Aberdeen – advising against (inter)national travel, we think we would see our numbers suffer/not get the best of the conference and, more importantly, we don’t want to risk our delegates, especially our international visitors.

We would like to emphasise that this is at this time a postponement rather than a cancellation – we will see how the covid-19 situation progresses over the summer months, and in the best case scenario, we would propose holding the meeting in early September instead. Of course, this is dependent on the global situation improving.

​More information to follow. Please get in touch at BLCS2020@abdn.ac.uk if you have any urgent questions or concerns.

We apologise for the inconveniences this may cause, and thank you in advance for your understanding.

At the next BLCS annual meeting in Aberdeen 2020 we are looking for nominations for a Vice-Chair position (4 year appointment) and a student representatives (2 year appointment) onto the steering committee.

Nominations for committee must be sent to the Secretary by 19th March 2020. Both nominees and nominators MUST be members of the Society and the express permission of the nominee must be obtained. Nomination forms are on the last page of this letter and can also be downloaded from here.

I would encourage you all members to consider nominating for his role in the community. For further details and current committee members you can view the Information Pages or the call original call here.

In approximately a year we will have to purchase a new batch of Gray and Hilsum medals.  This seems a good opportunity to reflect on how we wish to honour our colleagues for their distinguished work in liquid crystal research (see Gray Medal and Hilsum Medal for details of the two awards).   The current award consists of a silver plated medal.  Liquid crystals are objects of extraordinary beauty and we were wondering whether we could honour our prize winners by offering them an artefact that reflected their multi-coloured and multi-form nature, instead of a medal.  We do not have any particular object in mind, it could be a glass sculpture, a flat surface, e.g. painting or enamel, or something else entirely.

• When designing the object, please keep in mind that it has to be reproduceable, i.e. think about how that should be done.
• The artefact should still be roughly the size of a medal, therefore not bigger than 10 cm in diameter, and not be much higher than 5 cm.
• Ideally we should be able to add the name of the recipient easily.
• If possible give an estimate about the production cost.

The design will be exhibited at the BLCS conference in Aberdeen and during the private view (drinks will be involved) everyone can vote for a design.

Get creative!

Susanne and Giampaolo.

The next workshop in this series will be held at the University of Birmingham from the 8^th to the 10^th January, 2020. The three-day event will start at noon on the 8^th and finish in the late afternoon of the 10^th_, and will include lectures, practical training sessions and the mini-symposium. The workshop is intended for early-stage researchers (primarily PhD students, but also post-doctoral research associates and researchers in industry, who are relatively new to the field of liquid-crystal research, irrespective of their academic disciplines) and can offer limited number of places.

Expressions of interest in the prescribed format (see the attachment HERE for details) are currently invited for attending the BLCS Annual Training Workshop to be held in January 2020. Please email your expression of interest to blcs-atw@contacts.bham.ac.uk by November 22, 2019. Accepted participants will be notified in due course. The workshop website can be viewed here.