UCLan reports on the new US Soft Matter calendar.

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UCLAN PHYSICIST WINS AN INTERNATIONAL ART COMPETITION

A physicist from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) has won an international art competition.

Dr Marco Pinna won the first “Where Soft Matter Science Meets Art” competition, conducted by the Soft Matter World network, which is supported by The National Science Foundation of USA.

Hosted by the University of California at Merced, one of the top research universities in the USA, the competition presented the most visually artistic images from peer recognised, world-leading scientific research.

The twelve winning images are featured in the first Soft Matter Calendar 2013 while Marco’s image recently received another acclaim. It is now the main feature image for the new website of the Soft Matter World.

Marco said: “My winning image called ‘Six very small nano-containers’, shows our theoretical prediction of nano-size polymeric capsuled for drug delivery in a human body or nano-reactor containers for chemical engineering. They have been published in a paper in the high ranking journal ACS Nano by American Chemical Society.”

Soft Matter is the most common thing we meet in our everyday life, in food, medicine, cosmetics, clothes, plastics, biological tissues.

He added: “Modern science is so complex that traditional tools are not always sufficient to understand it. That is particularly true for soft matter, which is probably the most complex of the fields, as it includes life itself.

“Today most modern computer graphics and visualization become crucial in physics research. I learnt this during my PhD, when I sometimes needed to redo an image 20-30 times before you could see the science ‘speak from it’.”

Andrei Zvelindovsky, Professor of Computational and Theoretical Physics at UCLan, commented: “Art and science are always influenced by each other. That was brilliantly explained in a recent public lecture by UCLan’s distinguished visitor, Professor Johan van der Maarel from the National University of Singapore. Dr Marco Pinna’s win demonstrates UCLan’s high international standing in physics, one of the most traditional and beautiful sciences.”